Published on 23 May 2016
China was in a constant period of unrest and turmoil after the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. None of the new leaders and presidents could really consolidate their power in China and a struggle between the different warlords. broke out. At the same time, China was eyeing a more prominent role within the international community and sent 150,000 workers to the Western Front as part of the Chinese Labour Corps.
May 24, 2016
The Age Of Warlords – China in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
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Trump is probably thinking “how hard can it be?” to run a government
In Monday’s Morning Jolt newsletter, National Review‘s Jim Geraghty overheard Donald Trump Jr.’s breakfast conversation and wrote about what he heard:
We live in a world where congressional Democrats voted to pass Obamacare without reading the full text of the legislation, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the U.S. has already landed astronauts on Mars, Congressman Hank Johnson fears the island of Guam will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize, Maxine Waters warns that because of spending cuts, “over 170 million jobs could be lost”; Nancy Pelosi asserts that “every month that we don’t have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs,” Harry Reid contended, “Everybody else [besides GOP members of Congress], including rich people, are willing to pay more [in taxes]. They want to pay more,” Republican senator Thad Cochran declared in 2014 that “the Tea Party is something I don’t know a lot about,” and of course, Representative Todd Akin proclaimed, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
There’s no shortage of lawmakers who seek to make sweeping changes to laws, without understanding the basics of the topic at hand. Take Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado:
To your last question: ‘What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips?’ I will tell you, these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them. So if you ban, if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won’t be any more available.
(DeGette is mixing up clips and ammunition. The magazine is what holds the bullets and is almost always re-used.)
In other words, we’ve had no shortage of high-ranking government officials who have no clue about what they’re talking about, are spectacularly misinformed, dumber than a bag of hammers, are simply crazy, or all of the above.
In light of all this, Trump probably thinks, How hard can it be? Simply by virtue of not being a moron, Trump feels he is destined to govern better than they do. Indeed, it’s a low bar to clear.
Idiot lawmakers are part of our problem in this country, but our circumstances wouldn’t be significantly improved if we replaced dumb, misinformed progressives with smarter, better-informed progressives. Barack Obama gets the presidential daily briefing every morning, which is presumably chock full of the best information our government can gather about what’s going on in the world, focusing on the most dangerous places and menacing threats. If he doesn’t want to see ISIS rising, no amount of briefings can get him to see ISIS rising.
But the problem with DeGette, and Cuomo, and most of our worst elected officials is that they mix a refusal to learn, acknowledge, or accept new information and a philosophy based upon some shaky-at-best assumptions: that government officials know best, that they will put the public or national interest ahead of their own interests, that the impact of basic forces like supply and demand can be mitigated by regulation, that disarming law-abiding citizens will lead to less crime, not more, and so on.
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The Great Enrichment
In the Wall Street Journal, economist Deirdre McCloskey pinpoints the launch point of the greatest increase in global human wealth ever seen:
In the 18th century, liberal thinkers such as Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin courageously advocated liberty in trade. By the 1830s and 1840s, a much enlarged intelligentsia, mostly the sons of bourgeois fathers, commenced sneering loftily at the liberties that had enriched their elders and made possible their own leisure. The sons advocated the vigorous use of the state’s monopoly of violence to achieve one or another utopia, soon.
Intellectuals on the political right, for instance, looked back with nostalgia to an imagined Middle Ages, free from the vulgarity of trade, a nonmarket golden age in which rents and hierarchy ruled. Such a conservative and Romantic vision of olden times fit well with the right’s perch in the ruling class. Later in the 19th century, under the influence of a version of science, the right seized upon social Darwinism and eugenics to devalue the liberty and dignity of ordinary people and to elevate the nation’s mission above the mere individual person, recommending colonialism and compulsory sterilization and the cleansing power of war.
On the left, meanwhile, a different cadre of intellectuals developed the illiberal idea that ideas don’t matter. What matters to progress, the left declared, was the unstoppable tide of history, aided by protest or strike or revolution directed at the evil bourgeoisie — such thrilling actions to be led, naturally, by themselves. Later, in European socialism and American Progressivism, the left proposed to defeat bourgeois monopolies in meat and sugar and steel by gathering under regulation or syndicalism or central planning or collectivization all the monopolies into one supreme monopoly called the state.
While all this deep thinking was roiling the intelligentsia of Europe, the commercial bourgeoisie — despised by the right and the left, and by many in the middle, too — created the Great Enrichment and the modern world. The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives. In doing so, it proved that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The supposedly inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not driven into misery; it was enriched. It turned out that ordinary men and women didn’t need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone, became immensely creative.
The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since human beings first domesticated wheat and horses. It has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine. Progress toward French-style equality of outcome was achieved not by taxation and redistribution but by the Scots’ very different notion of equality. The real engine was the expanding ideology of classical liberalism.
The Great Enrichment has restarted history. It will end poverty. For a good part of humankind, it already has. China and India, which have adopted some of economic liberalism, have exploded in growth. Brazil, Russia and South Africa, not to speak of the European Union — all of them fond of planning and protectionism and level playing fields — have stagnated.
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QotD: The battle of the crony capitalists
I am not sure that many politicians are good on this score, but Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are likely as bad as it gets on crony capitalism. Forget their policy positions, which are steeped in government interventionism in the economy, but just look at their personal careers. Each have a long history of taking advantage of political power to enrich themselves and their business associates. I am not sure what Cruz meant when he said “New York values”, but both Trump and Clinton are steeped in the New York political economy, where one builds a fortune through political connections rather than entrepreneurial vigor. Want to build a new parking lot next to your casino or start up a new energy firm — you don’t bother with private investors or arms length transactions, you go to the government.
Warren Meyer, “2016 Presidential Election: Battle of the Crony Capitalists”, Coyote Blog, 2016-05-13.
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