Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Nouriel Roubini Reports From Beijing

The Chinese economy is in the down phase of the central bank created boom-bust cycle, but that doesn't mean the standard of living in China hasn't taken a great leap forward after the abandonment of Mao's communist totalitarianism.

Nouriel Roubini reports:




 -RW

3 comments:

  1. I like your reference to the Great Leap Forward under Mao.

    It's really sad that most Americans don't know about the tens of millions of deaths under Chinese communism (and Russian communism) but everyone know about the horrible, but not as bad in terms of deaths, Hitler.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alec C., have you ever heard the inestimable Alan Charles Kors rousing speech on that subject?

      Found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPBUqtEbkqk (It really gets going around the 20-minute mark.)

      I transcribed portions of it a few years ago. Here are some snippets:


      “[...] The communist Holocaust, however, should have brought forth a flowering of Western art and witness and sympathy. It should have called forth an Atlantic Ocean of tears. Instead, it has called forth a glacier of indifference. Kids, who in the 1960s had portraits of Mao Zadong or the sadistic Che Guevara on their college walls - the moral equivalent of having hung portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, or Goering in one's dorm - now teach our students about the moral superiority of THEIR generation.

      [...] Most of Europe has outlawed the Neo-Nazis, but the French Communist Party, from 1999 to 2002 was part of a ruling government. One may not fly the swastika, but one MAY hoist the hammer and cycle at any official event. The denial of Hitler's dead or the minimization of the Jewish Holocaust is, literally, a crime in most of Europe. The denial or minimization of Communist crimes is an intellectual and political art form.

      [...] "Anti-Fascist" is a term of honor. "Anti-Communist" is a term of ridicule and abuse. So the dead lie among us, ignored, and anyone with moral eyes must see them, spilling naked out of our media, frozen in pain in our classrooms and sprawled unburied across our politics and our culture.

      [...] Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society to abolish private property and to assail economic inequality and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. .. Socialism in power produces scarcity, murderous inefficiency, arbitrary inequality, cronyism, enslavement, concentration camps, torture, terror, the destruction of civil society, ecological disaster, brutal secret police, and systemic tyranny EVERWHERE it ruled.

      [...] "You put private property ahead of people! You put profits ahead of people!" These remain potent maledictions; as if private property were not absolutely essential to the well-being, dignity, liberty and lives of the people; as if profits were not the measure of the people's satisfactions of want and desire. Indeed it is precisely to avoid the revitalization of classical liberal principles that our teachers, professors, information media and film makers ignore the comparative inquiry that the times so urgently demand. It is precisely because of the lessons that would be taught by knowledge that no revision of the curriculum occurs. For at least a generation, intellectual contempt for liberal society has been at the core of the humanities and the soft social sciences. This has accelerated, not changed, since the fall of the Berlin wall and our children do not know about the bodies. They do not know. When we examine ongoing Communist regimes, however transformed, how can we not be informed by history and the bodies. Again, a monstrous historical double standard.

      [...] Let the apologists for communism acknowledge the dead, bury the dead, and atone for the dead. The bodies demand accounting, apology and repentance. Without such things, the age of Communism lives." - Alan Charles Kors

      Delete
    2. Excellent. Very powerful observations.

      Delete