Aggregatore di feed

Ironically, two seemingly unrelated articles in today’s New York Times reflect much of what is wrong with the United States, at least in an economic sense. One op-ed, titled “The Tragedy of Joe Biden,” is by Peter Coy, a regular columnist for the Times. The other one, titled “A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess” is a Times editorial.

In his article, Coy expresses sympathy for Joe Biden. He says that Biden just didn’t get the credit he deserved for what he did in managing the economy. He laments, “He had some remarkable achievements when it comes to the economy, but he couldn’t shape the narrative around his own record.” Coy writes about Biden’s pride in having created more than 16 million new jobs and his success against inflation.

What’s wrong with Coy’s point? Like so many other people, he doesn’t question the notion that in the United States, like in other countries, it’s the job of a president to manage the economy. A presidentially managed economy is now just taken as a given. No one questions it. And if a president does a good job at managing an economy, he gets reelected. If he doesn’t, the voters reject him. As the adage goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

At the same time, most everyone is convinced, thanks to the indoctrination received in America’s government-managed educational system, that Americans live under an economic system known as “free enterprise.” But in a free-enterprise system — a genuine free-enterprise system — economic activity is free of governmental regulation, control, and management.

So, how does one reconcile the principle of a presidentially managed economy with a genuine free-enterprise system? One doesn’t. They are opposites. By its very terms, a presidentially managed economy violates the principle of economic activity that is free of governmental regulation, control, and management.

Where Coy and Biden and most other Americans go wrong is in judging the principle of a presidentially managed economy within a relatively short time period — say, the last four years. Actually, the better measure is the last 100 years or so, stretching all the way back to the Franklin Roosevelt regime, when the principle of central planning, along with what is called a welfare state, was adopted by the U.S. government.

Consider, for example, the value of the dollar. Since the time that FDR foisted a paper-money system on the American people, there has been a downward trend in the value of the paper dollar. Sure, there have been periodic upswings in value along the way, which were proclaimed as a great success for the presidents who were in office during such upswings, but the overall trend has been down, down, down. Take a look at this graph.

Consider the $36 trillion in federal debt that now hangs over the American people. That amounts to around $323,000 per taxpayer. Take a look at this website. That debt continues to climb, incessantly.

Moreover, that debt doesn’t include the so-called unfunded liabilities, such as Social Security and Medicare. That’s even more money that has to be paid by the American people in the years ahead.

And then there are the periodic booms and busts caused by the Federal Reserve System, the entity responsible for managing the paper-money system that FDR foisted on America. An incessant cycle of raising and lowering interest-rate rates as well as managing the supply of paper money in the system, which has brought decades of of cyclical recessions and fake prosperity.

The welfare state and the centrally managed economy were supposed to bring an economic paradise to America. They did the opposite. They brought economic chaos and crisis. Let’s not forget the countless Americans who are now living from paycheck to paycheck, with barely any savings. It’s also worth mentioning the many young people who, because of financial straits, are still living with parents into their 20s and 30s. Millions of American hopelessly dependent on federal taxpayer-funded largess. Not exactly an economic paradise. The economist Ludwig von Mises put it best when he pointed out that centrally planning produces “planned chaos.”

Few better examples of this phenomenon can be found than in immigrtion, the topic of the Times’ editorial. But the good news is that the Times has a plan — what it calls a “big idea” — to finally resolve the decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual “immigration mess.” Isn’t that exciting? It’s a three-pronged plan consisting of the following:

1. “The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States.”

Wow! That’s ingenious! Why didn’t anyone, including U.S. presidents and their advisers, think of that before now?

2. “Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration.”

Wow! Another ingenious idea! Darn, if only someone had thought about that before today.

3. “The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here.”

Again, wow! This is absolutely brilliant. Why couldn’t anyone think of this before now.

There you have it — the perfect plan for the federal government to finally — finally! — bring an end to the ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis.

But there is at least one big problem with it. It won’t work. That’s because central planning doesn’t work. Contrary to what the Times’s editorial states in its opening sentence, America’s immigration-control system is not “broken,” as everyone loves to maintain. Instead, it is inherently defective because central planning is inherently defective. Something that is broken can potentially be fixed. Something that is inherently defective cannot be fixed.

It would be difficult to find a better example of central planning than America’s immigration-control system. It would also be difficult to find a better example of “planned chaos.” What the Times fails to realize — what most Americans fail to realize — is that the chaos and crisis they lament in immigration is rooted in the very system they support. Keep the system, even in a newly reformed way, and you keep the chaos. Dismantle the system and you end the chaos.

Alas, unfortunately the notion of a presidentially or centrally managed economy is too deeply set within the minds of the American people. One of these days, however, there will be a rediscovery of the principles of a genuine free-market economy — one in which there is no central planning, mandatory charity or welfare, governmental regulation, or presidential management — and people will then be able to enjoy the benefits of freedom, prosperity, and harmony.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post The Failure and Fallacy of Central Planning appeared first on LewRockwell.

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”—George Orwell, Animal Farm

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.

After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.

In other words, the Deep State wins again.

The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.

None of this is news.

The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.

Indeed, Richard Nixon let the cat out of the bag when he explained that the very act of being president places one beyond the rule of law (“when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal”).

This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.

George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.

In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.

While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

As Orwell explains:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.

That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.

Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

It was a set-up, folks.

The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.

The only coup d’etat to undermine the will of the people happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”

This swamp is of the Deep State’s making to such an extent that every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s  tune.

Beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC, merely paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden was no different: his job was to keep the Deep State in power.

Trump’s return to the White House has already thrown wide the gates to all manner of swampiness.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

“…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…”

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

Incredibly enough, more than 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government.  When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small-town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

The 2021 military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

That was not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

January 6, 2021, and its aftermath merely provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This brings us back to Orwell’s Animal Farm, which turns 80 this year.

Originally titled a fairy story, the satirical allegory recounts the revolutionary struggle of a group of farm animals living in squalor and neglect on a poorly run farm managed by a derelict farmer.

Hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, the farm animals mount a revolution, ejecting the farmer, taking control of the farm, establishing their own Bill of Rights, and operating under the mantra “four legs good, two legs bad.” Not surprisingly, as is the case with most revolutions, the new boss—a pig named Napoleon—turns out to be no different from their old human oppressor. Over time, a ruling class of pigs comes to dominate on the farm, which is policed by dogs, with the pigs starting to dress, walk and talk like their human counterparts. Eventually, the pigs forge an alliance with their former two-legged adversaries in order to maintain their power over the rest of the farm animals. Before long, the pigs’ transformation into two-legged overlords is complete: “they were all alike.”

Much like the gullible, easily led creatures of Animal Farm, we find ourselves being brainwashed into believing that the tyrannies meted out against us are for our own good; that the trials are tribulations we experience at the hands of the ruling elite are privileges for which we should feel grateful; and that our bondage to the Deep State is actually, appearances to the contrary, freedom.

Over time, without their realizing it, the Seven Commandments of liberation and equality that were so central to Animal Farm’s revolutionary movement are whittled down to a single commandment: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

And that, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is the lesson for all of us in the American Police State as we prepare for yet another changing of the guard in Washington, DC.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

The Cradle

The post Extremist Israeli settler leaders invited as ‘special guests’ to Trump inauguration appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Gallup  News

The post More Americans Favor Quick End to Ukraine War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post What Will Trump Do On Ukraine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw

The post PS: Comparison of Los Angeles Total budgets 2022-23 vs. 2023-24 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Watching just a bit of the Hegseth hearings before the Senate AF Committee, it is clear that many on that committee understand exactly what is at stake.  Hegseth will be a US secretary of defense offense who will obey Donald Trump, won’t be bought by the same old companies, but can probably be contained by other means. His assigned mission in the Pentagon will be to disrupt, delay and deny — and Senators were sweating their real concern about a potential disruption of the district kickbacks and reduction of state defense investments, their nervousness thinly disguised by statements about doing right by the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

Both Hegseth and the members of the Committee seem unfamiliar with various parts of the Constitution, and come across as unprepared.  It’s probably a match made in heaven. Curiously, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin made a lot of sense.  Of course, he’s a plumber and a rancher, both careers Americans have far more need of than “US Senator.”  Another point of light:  Hegseth’s written statement included a sly, if sophomoric, callback to the days of Rumsfeld, asserting “I know what I don’t know.” This is on its face silly — but it reminds us that the Senate easily confirmed secretaries of defense in our lifetimes that have been far more dangerous and anti-American than Hegseth will ever be.

I doubt Hegseth, or any other secretary of defense that this Senate can confirm, will be much of a disruptor.  It is the job of Congress to cut spending, to hold the executive branch accountable, and end the illegal wars, the odd overseas assassination, and genocides that nearly all of them support to some degree.  Most of them have no intention of doing their job. If this hearing is any guide, we can confirm only that the US Senate and House will do what they always do — give the Pentagon more money than even that rapacious cesspool of waste and fraud asks for, and mandate inappropriate, unneeded, and unsupportable defense programs that have little or nothing to so with actually protecting our country, or American interests.

The post Which is scarier –Hegseth or the combined brainpower of the Senate Armed Forces Committee? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The Pacific Palisades before and after the fires appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith

The Independent

The post Explained: How UK’s long-running Islamophobia problem led to far-right riots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

New Lines Magazine

The post How an Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Thrives in the UK appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

John Leake

The post A Cancer of the Soul appeared first on LewRockwell.

As many of you know Dr Sam Bailey along with her husband, Dr Mark Bailey, gave up their medical licenses because they refused to stay within the corrupt system that required doctors to quietly follow orders to Jab, Mask and Censure – Or Else.

Well… The “Or Else” is still after Sam.

In this video, HERE, she updates you on this heinous $$$ shakedown and how she and Mark are standing up for Medical and Health Freedom.

This is an important video (19 min) and I urge you to please share it widely with everyone you care about.

Stopping Medical Corruption – and entrenched, committed ignorance – is essential for all of us as we learn how to take better care of ourselves and our loved ones.

Please watch and Share.

The post Exposing the Plan to Extort $$$ from Dr Sam Bailey appeared first on LewRockwell.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-capitalismo-degli-stakeholder)

Nelle imprese private “non c’è bisogno di limitare la discrezionalità dei subordinati con regole o regolamenti diversi da quelli che stanno alla base di tutte le attività commerciali, vale a dire, rendere le loro operazioni redditizie”.

In questa citazione dal suo libro del 1944, Bureaucracy, Mises spiega perché le aziende private a scopo di lucro non hanno bisogno della burocrazia e non dovrebbero essere invischiate in regole e regolamenti imposti dall'alto di una gerarchia amministrativa. Invece dovrebbero fare il miglior uso della “conoscenza del tempo e del luogo” decentralizzata per svolgere il loro lavoro. L'ammonimento di Mises, secondo cui l'obiettivo delle imprese capitaliste è e dovrebbe essere “fare profitti”, divenne in seguito, nelle mani degli economisti della Scuola di Chicago, “massimizzare il valore per gli azionisti”. Questo punto di vista è associato a Milton Friedman ed è stato accettato dalla gran parte delle aziende americane per molti anni.

Poi, nel 2018, l'amministratore delegato di Blackrock, Larry Fink, che all'epoca gestiva $6.000 miliardi in asset aziendali, ha insistito pubblicamente sul fatto che i dirigenti d'azienda avrebbero dovuto concentrarsi sugli “stakeholder” (ovvero tutti coloro che sono in qualche modo collegati a una società) invece che sugli azionisti. A ciò fece seguito, nell'agosto del 2019, una dichiarazione di 200 amministratori delegati di grandi società secondo cui massimizzare il valore per gli azionisti non era più il loro obiettivo principale; lo era, invece, aggiungere valore per tutti gli “stakeholder”.

All'epoca George Reisman scrisse che questo dimostrava che “molti amministratori delegati sanno talmente poco di economia da ignorare che in un libero mercato produrre per il profitto dei propri azionisti implica di per sé produrre per il beneficio di tutti”. Un'attività di successo e redditizia in un libero mercato concorrenziale avrà clienti che traggono benefici più di quanto spendono; i lavoratori saranno pagati più di quanto potrebbero guadagnare altrove; ci saranno città e paesi prosperi; e ne trarranno beneficio tutti gli “stakeholder” in generale.

Ciò che era significativo nella dichiarazione degli amministratori delegati, scrisse Reisman, era che “mostra fino a che punto l'eredità intellettuale americana del diritto a perseguire la felicità (il che include la ricerca del profitto) sia marcita e sia stata sostituita da una mentalità improntata al socialismo”. Inoltre dobbiamo tenere a mente che “man mano che cresce il potere arbitrario dello stato, gli uomini d'affari vengono messi in una posizione sempre più simile a quella degli ostaggi sequestrati dai terroristi”.

Ciò che intendeva dire è che i poteri normativi dello stato sono cresciuti talmente tanto (si veda la pubblicazione annuale del Competitive Enterprise Institute intitolata “Diecimila comandamenti”) che gli imprenditori sono costretti a trascorrere gran parte di ogni giornata lavorativa a seguire le regole e i regolamenti governativi invece di essere produttivi, proprio come Mises aveva messo in guardia. I regolatori sono “i terroristi” e gli imprenditori sono “gli ostaggi”. Inoltre, scrisse Reisman, “sono arrivati al punto in cui tentano di anticipare i desideri dei loro padroni e cercano di gratificarli senza prima ricevere gli 'ordini' normativi”. Ecco perché gli amministratori delegati hanno rilasciato quella dichiarazione: annunciare allo stato che avrebbero adottato volontariamente tutti i controlli e i regolamenti socialisti che esso avrebbe voluto imporre loro. È di fatto socialismo.

Ecco perché vediamo banchieri imporre quote razziali sui loro prestiti ipotecari per paura di essere perseguiti ai sensi del Community Reinvestment Act e bollati come razzisti; o case automobilistiche che si impongono normative più severe sul chilometraggio rispetto a quelle attualmente in vigore per paura di essere viste in futuro ed etichettate come “ostruzioniste”; e la più predominante in assoluto, l'imposizione di quote di razza e genere per assunzioni e promozioni sotto le mentite spoglie di “diversità, equità e inclusione”. Tutte queste cose vi faranno guadagnare punti KPI (indicatori chiave di prestazione) in ​​qualsiasi azienda americana.

Prima del 2019 molte aziende avevano ignorato l'ammonimento di Mises sull'istruire i subordinati a “fare profitto”, o addirittura “massimizzare il valore per gli azionisti”, e li avevano valutati con un guazzabuglio di “indicatori chiave di prestazione” (per l'appunto KPI). Questi “indicatori” hanno rapidamente incluso una miriade di obiettivi nebulosi per gli “stakeholder” e annunci di pubbliche relazioni. Scrivendo su Forbes un articolo intitolato, “Perché i KPI non funzionano”, il consulente aziendale e autore Steve Denning ha scritto di come le aziende avessero adottato un “labirinto di offuscamenti in chiave pubbliche relazioni solo per far contento il pubblico [...]”.

Un problema persistente con i KPI è, come sottolinea Denning, che molti degli indicatori “portano a incentivi perversi e conseguenze indesiderate come risultato del fatto che i dipendenti lavorano in base a misurazioni specifiche a spese della qualità o del valore effettivo per i clienti”. Il risultato è che i dipendenti stessi tendono a sviluppare KPI che mostrano semplicemente che si sta facendo più lavoro di facciata, ma non dimostrano che le prestazioni o il servizio clienti siano migliorati. I KPI, afferma Denning, “misurano la velocità della burocrazia”, ma “sono inversamente proporzionali alla produttività effettiva”. Mises sarebbe d'accordo.

“Come criceti in una ruota, il personale lavora di più ma non riesce a fare granché dal punto di vista produttivo”. Ciò riporta alla mente le storie di come l'Unione Sovietica cercò di giocare al capitalismo con vari obblighi, come l'ordine di produrre tante tonnellate di chiodi all'anno per soddisfare il successivo piano quinquennale di costruzione di case. I direttori di fabbrica stabilirono che il modo più semplice per farlo era produrre chiodi molto pesanti, abbastanza pesanti da spaccare assi di legno da due per quattro!

Peggio ancora, la mancanza di performance causata dai KPI in genere porta i dirigenti a rispondere “offrendo una valanga di nuovi KPI nel tentativo di dimostrare quanto siano produttivi”. Essi sono quindi “un dono di Dio alla burocrazia”, ​​secondo Denning: “Aiutano a perpetuarla e a creare infinite giustificazioni per essa. È lavoro, si nutre di lavoro e crea altro lavoro, senza servire a uno scopo esterno”.

Denning conclude suggerendo che le aziende dovrebbero concentrarsi sulla “creazione di valore per i clienti”, che è un altro modo di dire “fare solo profitti” invece di creare una gigantesca mostruosità burocratica. Ci si chiede se abbia letto Bureaucracy di Mises, come ha di recente ammesso di aver fatto il senatore Ted Cruz.

In un altro articolo intitolato, “Non aggiustate la burocrazia, uccidetela”, Denning ricorda la Genentech Corporation che ha oltre 100.000 dipendenti, ognuno dei quali è tenuto a elaborare un elenco KPI. Pochissimi degli elementi negli elenchi, scrive Denning, “avevano a che fare con la fornitura di valore ai clienti”.

Anche le organizzazioni non profit e le agenzie governative hanno adottato i KPI, ma questi problemi sono destinati a essere ancora più gravi in tali settori. Come per le aziende, è probabile che vengano utilizzati per dimostrare che è stato svolto molto lavoro di routine, anche se quest'ultimo non contribuisce in alcun modo a realizzare la missione dell'organizzazione.

Esistono metriche facili da usare per tutti i tipi di organizzazioni che rientrano nella definizione di KPI e possono essere utili se non essenziali. Ma ciò che è successo nelle aziende americane è la “mentalità improntata al socialismo” descritta da Reisman: la folle anticipazione di obblighi, controlli e regolamenti governativi con l'autoimposizione degli stessi. Sembra tutto una pianificazione centrale socialista di fatto, non è vero?

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una “mancia” in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah

There is nothing “massive” about that number, especially considering that 10 million illegals entered under Biden.

https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1878430307495408077

If they aren’t talking about deporting tens of millions of people, they aren’t serious about solving the illegal immigration problem. Just deporting violent criminals and sex offenders is not acceptable. Anybody who came here illegally needs to be rounded up and sent back to whatever the hell they came from.

Of course, the problem with legal immigration is much worse. There’s no sign they’re going to do anything substantive with the fraudulent H-1B visa program because billionaires like Elon Musk want obsequious Indians for cheap slave labor. If you oppose this Musk has said that you can fuck your face and that he’s ready to go to war with you. 

We’ll just have to see what happens with all this, but there’s no reason for me to be optimistic that mass deportations are actually going to happen.

The post Border Czar Tom Homan says that the Trump administration aims to deport just under 1.5 million illegal immigrants. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

When Zionism Resembles Nazism — And Neo-Fascists Side With Netanyahu 

The post When Zionism Resembles Nazism — And Neo-Fascists Side With Netanyahu appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

https://archive.is/e7KHk 

https://archive.is/fp0cH

The post Who really runs the world? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Joe Biden has not even left office yet and conservatives are calling him the worst president in history. Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said on Fox Business said that Biden “cemented” his title through a “litany” of lies. Jarrett maintained that the list of Biden’s lies “is almost endless”: inflation, the price of gasoline, immigration, tax rates, his own classified document scandal, domestic violence, COVID vaccines, student loan forgiveness, and Afghanistan.

Liberals would, of course, disagree, and say that Trump is the worst president in history even though he hasn’t even begun his second term.

Yet, most conservatives and liberals would agree that Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were some of the best presidents instead of three of the absolute worst.

It is hard to say who was the worst president. Aside from Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR; Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe Biden are certainly in the bottom ten.

It is easy to say who was the best president. It is not even close. This man is so far above the others who have held the office or the presidency that no one will ever surpass him in greatness. The best president was the ninth president, William Henry Harrison (1773–1841). He was the president only from March 4 to April 4, 1841, making him the shortest serving president in history.

Harrison was the last president born before the United States became a nation. His father signed the Declaration of Independence. He fought in the War of 1812. He served as governor of the new Indiana territory. He negotiated treaties with Indians. He was elected to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. He had ten children. He is the only president to have a grandson elected president (Benjamin Harrison). Until Ronald Reagan, he was the oldest president to be inaugurated. Yet, what Harrison is most remembered for is being the first president to die in office.

It is because Harrison died in office after only a month as president that he should be considered to be the best president.

He died before signing into law any unconstitutional legislation.

He died before lying to the American people.

He died before compromising his principles.

He died before becoming embroiled in a scandal.

He died before committing adultery.

He died before trampling on Americans’ rights and liberties.

He died before authorizing the invasion of other countries.

He died before nationalizing land.

He died before misusing the military.

He died before making an executive order.

He died before appointing any bad justices to the Supreme Court.

He died before disgracing the office of the president.

He died before abusing his power.

It is because of these things that William Henry Harrison was the best president that America ever had or ever will have.

The post The Best President appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since the wildfires (which, in my California childhood and girlhood, used to be called “forest fires”) broke out last week in Los Angeles, I have been living in a kind of anguish. It is not, of course, thankfully, the material agony faced by the millions of people now in a hellscape that used to be a paradise, or the unimaginable agony faced by the tens of thousands who have lost their homes and belongings.

Mine is an intellectual misery, rather, as I watch something unfold that is clearly, to me at least, the latest Pearl Harbor in our history.

It is so clear to me that events in Los Angeles constitute an attack that is part of a war. Pearl Harbor was the second attack on our homeland since the War of 1812; 9/11 was the third; and the Battle of Los Angeles is the fourth.

In order to make that statement, I have to explain again what a war is. Since April of 2020, when Brian O’Shea first explained to me “unrestricted warfare’, that Chinese Communist concept and goal, and that the CCP makes war in ways with which Westerners were unfamiliar, I have been persuaded by his argument that we are under attack unconventionally from multiple directions.

To recap: “unrestricted warfare” is a method of degrading the resources and morale of the enemy so thoroughly, bit by bit, that a shot need not be fired.

Brian gave me a dramatic image familiar to China hawks, in explaining this concept: we in the West expect to see war as an invasion or a bombing attack or to see enemy boots on the ground. We expect armies in uniforms on a battlefield, facing off.

But the goal of “unrestricted warfare” is to surround the enemy before the enemy even realizes what is happening.

Western warfare, he explained, is like chess: clearly marked kings and queens and knights squaring off directly against one another. The CCP’s “unrestricted warfare,” in contrast, is like the ancient Chinese game of Go, in which the goal is steadily, stealthily to surround, and thus paralyze, your opponent.

If you understand this concept, most of the last five years make sense. You are also more likely to survive what is — a war.

I do not mean to suggest, as those who follow my work know, that we are under attack by the CCP alone. The alliance is global and multifaceted: the WEF, WHO, Bill Gates, tech bros, “globalist technocrat oligarchs”, to hammer out a phrase; the aligned Bad Actors.

I have explained that the mRNA injections (the Pfizer version made by BioNTech, according to my original research, in a MOU with the Chinese Communist Party) and our pharmaceutical supply in general, now held hostage by China, are part of this “unrestricted warfare” against us. The “mandates”, that stripped us of thousands of able-bodied and experienced firefighters, police, soldiers and sailors, special forces operators, EMTs, and other health care workers — the key people who can protect “the homeland” in the event of an attack — were part of this warfare. The purchasing of farmland by China (and by its proxy, Canada) and China’s purchasing of farmland near 19 of our military bases in what The New York Post calls an “alarming” threat to our national security — ditto.

A treasonous administration in which the President’s son, Hunter Biden, accepted what may have been vast sums of money from China, unrelated to legitimate business dealings — has been part of this war. The Chinese “weather balloon” — per the Chinese Embassy and much of our legacy media — but “spy balloon,” per our intelligence community, that traversed the United States continent, and which no doubt mapped military installations and other infrastructure on its path, and about which we were told by our leadership not to worry, is part of this war. (Did you know, by the way, that this spy balloon had been permitted to use a US telecommunications company to communicate with China, on its journey? Neither had I. That kind of coordination used to be called both espionage and treason and would properly be a capital sentence for whoever facilitated these communications and this operation.)

Of course, 16 to 30 million people, millions of them men of military age, with military bearing and training, and from nations such as Azerbaijan and Somalia and Afghanistan, that export mercenaries, entering the US via a staged three-nation operation underwritten by the US State Department and the United Nations, to be met by a State Department-funded “Welcome Corps”, are part of that war.

Of course these foreigners vanishing into the interior, or being housed in barracks-type accommodation, including at sensitive sites such as Chicago O’Hare airport, in housing paid for by the US Government, is part of this war.

That is all a staging operation.

Of course, the fact that some of them are terrorists or aligned with terrorist nations, and that, according to former border agent JJ Carrell, in the past they’d be interviewed by the FBI and deported, but now they are simply let go into the interior, is part of that war.

JJ Carrell testified to Congress that over 250,000 “special interest aliens” have now entered the United States.

Of course, “Sanctuary cities” that position these potentially violent men across our nation, are part of this war. Of course, the otherwise insane “defund the police” movement, that sprang up like crocuses in the Spring, out of nowhere, is part of this war.

Now – obviously – in Los Angeles, this stealthy war had moved from being latent, staging its various elements and features across our nation, to becoming “hot” or “kinetic,” as veterans such as my husband would say.

The painful aspect of this moment is that our country for the most part does not realize that there has been a “hot” attack on the US, covered via the narrative and reality of the Los Angeles wildfires.

Let me restate (as I feel I have been doing since I wrote my 2007 book about how democracies die, The End of America) that in crisis narratives designed to destroy Republics or Parliamentary democracies, a disaster can be real and also be exploited and manipulated.

What if an attack was waged on the US homeland, but no one realized it because it was simply called something else?

That is what we are seeing now, in my view: a war in plain sight, an attack on our second largest city, but one that is brilliantly concealed from the public by simply being narrated to obscure its nature.

Yes, the attack started with wildfires. But every year has wildfire season in California. What was different?

As fires broke out in Pacific Palisades last Tuesday, then continued day after day to spread to other areas in the city, LA Mayor Karen Bass was in — Accra, Ghana. Why? “The mayor was selected by President Joe Biden as one of his four-member presidential delegation to attend the inauguration of the African nation’s incoming president, John Dramani Mahama.”

It is unusual if not weird for a President to ask a city Mayor, who does not work for the Federal government, and who has no current connection to the US embassy in Ghana, to represent the US government on a trip of this kind. US Ambassador Virginia Palmer would represent the US typically at an inauguration in her assigned country.

Yet the Presidential delegation with its abruptly chosen member from LA, did not even make it onto the US Embassy in Ghana’s website.

The White House announced this four-person delegation on January 3 — just four days before the Ghanaian Inauguration on January 7. All of this is unusually sudden and somewhat random protocol.

Look at the delegation members:

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. today announced the designation of a Presidential Delegation to attend the Inauguration of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama on January 7, 2025, in Accra, Ghana.

The Honorable Shalanda D. Young, Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, will lead the delegation.

Members of the Presidential Delegation:

The Honorable Virginia E. Palmer, United States Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana

The Honorable Karen Bass, Mayor of Los Angeles, California

The Honorable Frances Z. Brown, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, National Security Council, The White House.

So — the Director of OMB, one of the most important and powerful agencies in the US, and the one that oversees funding and that is in charge of identifying financial corruption — odd, needed elsewhere, but ok; the US Ambassador to Ghana, yes of course; a top specialist on Africa in the National Security Council, yes, makes sense; and — the mayor of Los Angeles?

One thing in this picture does not belong.

Then – last Tuesday and Wednesday, as firefighters bravely sought to manage the spreading infernos, a key reservoir was empty. Why? Cosmetic repairs to its cover. The hydrants in the affluent neighborhood of Pacific Palisades were dry, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

“The Santa Ynez Reservoir was out of use and closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades, […]

The large reservoir, had it been operable, could have helped with extending water pressure in the Palisades on Tuesday night, but only for a time, a former DWP general manager told Hamilton.”

This kind of activity — creating a context of vulnerability – is standard in preparing for an attack in a “hot war.”

It is called sabotage: cutting the supply lines to a targeted population. You have to look at what actually happened in Los Angeles, rather than listen to what events are being called.

This all may be being called incompetence in the local media, but it looks like war preparation and war engagement to me. (This tactic of the leader being absent before a crisis by fire, is part of a playbook, it appears.

Then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was also on vacation when wildfires devastated formerly protected acres in Australia in 2019, destroying millions of animals and precious ecosystems and thus opening these acres up for development and exploitation. He too, as DailyClout.io’s original reporting showed at the time, could have called for firefighting planes in a treaty with the US Forest Service, and chose not to do so).

Then — ten thousand homes were reported to have been destroyed, and by yesterday, ten people were confirmed dead (the number today has risen to 16).

180,000 people were reported to have been displaced, as multiple fires assailed and destroyed much of what had been some of the most valuable and beautiful real estate in the nation — the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, along with iconic homes along the shoreline; and as fires threatened Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood and Encino and Pasadena; and destroyed Altadena.

As I write, multiple fires are still burning, pouring toxins into the atmosphere, and winds are expected to pick up tomorrow and Tuesday, threatening more destruction. The scenes were unforgettable; a raging red-magenta glow like the mouth of Hell stretched across the legendary, familiar, sparkling night horizon, and extended what seemed like miles into the jet-black sky.

Read the Whole Article

The post What Is a War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

The funeral pageantry and tributes to the late Jimmy Carter seemed a tad contrived, as if America’s political establishment was trying its best to project an image of national unity and reverential soul – at a time when the country is irrevocably, bitterly divided and its institutions are tarnished beyond redemption.

Carter died at the age of 100 on December 29 – the longest-lived U.S. president in history – and was given a state funeral on January 9 in the National Cathedral in Washington. A national day of mourning was declared, and flags flew at half mast on public buildings.

The drawn-out funeral arrangement seemed to give the media endless scope for nostalgia about a humble peanut farmer who became president for one term between 1977 and 1981. The rose-tinted view of Carter’s legacy harked to a time of supposed decency and bipartisan civility in American politics.

The contrast with the present partisan enmity in U.S. politics could not be sharper. The contempt between Democrats and Republicans could not be more vicious.

Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. He takes over from Democrat Joe Biden. The vaunted peaceful transfer of power is a charade. During the election campaign last year, Biden repeatedly called Trump the “biggest threat to our democracy.” This was a reference to Trump’s demagoguery and fascist proclivities.

Yet, at the funeral for Carter, Trump was seated beside former Democrat President Barack Obama, chatting and smiling before the service. Also sitting in the front rows were Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the election to Trump – despite her condemnations also lambasting Trump as a threat to democracy.

The contrived bonhomie between Obama and Trump was cringemaking. Trump had stoked the false claims about “Kenyan-born” Obama not being an American citizen and dog-whistled racist hatred by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama.

Two days before Carter’s funeral, Trump was mouthing off about forcibly taking back the Panama Canal and he trashed Carter for signing away American ownership of the canal in 1977.

The top mourners in the National Cathedral included former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

The church pews were more fitting of the dock at the Nuremberg Trials for war criminals.

Biden gave an oration for his “close friend” as if to grift off the image of Carter as a benign Commander-in-Chief.

Biden couldn’t resist sticking it to Trump with pointed “lessons” from Carter’s life of humility, public service and lack of ego. Biden also said Carter was an exemplar of resisting “the greatest sin – the abuse of power.”

How absurdly rich that Biden should stand up to lecture on not abusing power after he used his presidential office to pardon his convicted criminal son. Biden is rushing through preemptive pardons for people that the Democrats fear the Trump administration will go after in reprisal prosecutions.

When Jimmy Carter won the election in 1976, he was a relative breath of fresh air in the corrupt milieu of Washington. It was after the Watergate scandal of the Richard Nixon presidency, which was notorious for lies and political intrigue. It was also the end of the shameful Vietnam War – an imperialist genocide waged on lies about defending democracy against communism in Southeast Asia.

But Carter’s presidency wasn’t distinguished by greatness. He lost the 1980 election to Republican Ronald Reagan owing to a mess over the Iranian revolution kicking out the US-backed client dictatorship of Shah Pahlavi in Tehran.

Carter’s long post-presidential career as a humanitarian envoy in a private capacity did gain international respect. But in later life, he was outspokenly critical of his own nation’s politics. Carter denounced the distorting effect of big money in American elections. He said with candid truth that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but rather had become an oligarchy.

Trump’s incoming administration has more billionaires than any previous one in history. Chief among them is South African-born tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, the richest man in the U.S., who donated $250 million to the Trump campaign.

American democracy died decades ago. The exact death knell is debatable. Was it the CIA assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, or was it the vote-rigging theft of the presidential election in 1960 by JFK with the help of the Mafia?

Was it the Vietnam War that killed millions of Vietnamese that Carter’s election tried to redeem? Or was it Carter’s support for Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, a network of Islamists that evolved into Al Qaeda terrorists?

The same terrorists who Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden bombed multiple countries to supposedly defeat? The same terrorists who have taken over Syria and whom the U.S. media is busily whitewashing as a legitimate government in Damascus.

Or did U.S. democracy die when Teddy Roosevelt grabbed Panama with imperialist thuggery to construct the 80-kilometer canal (1904-1914)? The canal that Trump wants to grab back – by military force if needs be.

Or was it the failed fascist coup against another Roosevelt, FDR, in 1933, by Nazi-supporting American corporate leaders?

Or the rise of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his valedictory speech in 1961? Or the creation of the CIA assassination organization in 1947, which Eisenhower later ordered to carry out the coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 54?

Or was it slave-owning “Founding Fathers” at the birth of the United States of America who went on to exterminate native Americans to steal their lands?

The web of lies and deception in American imperialist politics runs deep and wide. All of the above is but a glimpse of the nefarious disease.

The precise date of death for American pretensions of democracy is hard to determine.

But what we see now in the present day is a moribund state of corruption, lies, and loathing where the office is an openly oligarchic plaything, where foreign policy and imperialist bullying will henceforth be conducted by billionaires via Twitter. The mutual contempt for democracy among American political puppets of the warmongering oligarchy is no longer concealed.

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

American democracy was buried a long time ago.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Farewell to Jimmy Carter… and American Democracy appeared first on LewRockwell.

The New American Cold War Against China

Over the last year I gradually became familiar with Chas Freeman, one of America’s most distinguished professional diplomats and a longtime expert on China. Despite his illustrious career, he had rarely appeared anywhere in our mainstream media, but once I discovered his interviews on several YouTube channels, I was extremely impressed by the depth of his knowledge and analysis, so I published an article presenting his views.

In one of his public lectures, he suggested that America’s new Cold War against China had many similarities to our previous conflict against the USSR, except that this time we were playing the role of our old vanquished adversary, an analogy I had frequently expressed myself:

In international affairs, as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Our actions have stimulated China to mirror, meet, and match our military hostility to it. We are now in an arms race with China, and it is far from clear that we are holding our own…

Despite China’s remarkable military buildup, Beijing has so far kept defense spending well below two percent of GDP. Meanwhile, cost control continues to elude the Pentagon. DoD has never passed an audit and is infamous for the waste, fraud, and mismanagement that result from its reliance on cost-plus procurement from the U.S. equivalent of profit-driven state-owned enterprises – military-industrial corporate bureaucracies whose revenues (and profits) come entirely from the government. The U.S. defense budget is out of control in terms of our ability to pay for it.

Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.

• Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 9, 2024 • 7,500 Words

Around that same time, someone else brought to my attention some of the YouTube channels created by Westerners who documented their travels to various foreign lands including China, or those who had actually moved to that country and were living there. I was fascinated to discover the existence of such widespread sources of personal, first-hand information about the reality of life in that enormous country, including both its huge cities and its small rural villages. After spending a couple of days viewing dozens of such videos, I published an article presenting some of my conclusions:

From the late 1970s onward, my predictions for China’s future development had always been far more optimistic than those of anyone else whom I knew, but nonetheless I have been staggered by the astonishing scale of that country’s achievements over the last 45 years…

Consider that in 1980, the Chinese population overwhelmingly consisted of desperately impoverished peasants, far poorer than Haitians. And compare that recent past with those videos of China’s enormous, futuristic cities, now among the most advanced in the entire world, with nearly all of those gleaming, towering edifices constructed in just the last two or three decades. Obviously, nothing like this has ever previously happened in the history of the world…

As a child, I occasionally visited Disneyland, and one of the popular early attractions of that pioneering theme park was Tomorrowland, depicting the urban wonders that our future would hold. But as far as I can tell, few if any of those developments ever occurred in our own country, with California’s aging, increasingly decrepit freeways merely becoming much more congested than they were a half-century ago, and America lacking even a single mile of high-speed rail. Meanwhile, the scenes of China’s magnificent cities seem exactly like what Walt Disney had originally envisioned, but filled with far more greenery and nature areas and constructed on a scale ten-thousand times larger.

The greatest factor behind China’s tremendous success had obviously been the high ability and hard work of the Chinese people, together with the clear competence of their government and its leadership:

For decades, international testing has shown that China has the world’s highest average IQ, and this finding has dramatic implications at the top end. As physicist Steve Hsu pointed out in 2008, international psychometric data indicates that the American population probably contains some 10,000 individuals having an IQ of 160 or higher, while the total for China is around 300,000, a figure thirty times larger.

Over the last couple of generations, respectable American intellectual circles have severely anathematized this controversial topic, but scientific reality exists whether or not our elites choose to pretend otherwise. Indeed, these racial and evolutionary factors regarding the Chinese people have been completely obvious to me for nearly the last half-century, and such factors largely explained my confident expectations of China’s rise, expectations that have been proven entirely correct.

• American Pravda: Propaganda-Hoaxes vs. Chinese Reality
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 16, 2024 • 6,700 Words

A central point of that second article had been that China’s greatest resource was the large number of its highly-intelligent and well-educated citizens. As it happens, one such individual named Hua Bin had recently begun reading our website, and he left a favorable comment describing his own perspective.

…As a Chinese, I have already tuned out the dishonest western media when it comes to reporting on China (or any adversarial countries for that matter). I used to read NYT, WSJ, FT, the Economist, etc almost on daily basis, especially their reports on China, for at least 2 decades. But since 2017 or so, the bias in the reporting has become epidemic, even laughable. Now I receive most of my news from the so-called alternative media…

I myself certainly serve as a living proof of the vast changes that have happened in China – I was earning an income 6,000 times of my first job after college in 1993, when I retired 6 years ago. And no, I wasn’t a business owner either. I’d love to share some insights from an authentic local Chinese perspective.

When I checked, I discovered he’d left another favorable comment last month on one of my previous China articles, in which he had emphasized the positive traits inculcated by the Confucianist thought that has traditionally played such a central role in Chinese culture:

…One critical thing to know about China is the importance the country and its population attach to the concept of meritocracy and virture in personal behavior, economic life, and governance. This is the ideal to aspire as taught by Confucius since 500BCE. Just like the Bible, Confucius thoughts is a guide to the Chinese nation for the last 2500 years. Unlike the Bible, it is still a required part of the curriculum for every school child (except during the turbulent times of Cultural Revolution). The revival of Confucius teaching is a big part of the country’s success.

In his most recent comment, Hua also mentioned that he’d created a Substack in the last few weeks, and had begun writing various pieces on China’s economy, technology, and military preparedness against the U.S., providing links to several of these. On that Substack, he described himself as a retired business executive and geopolitical observer.

Once I began reading his posts, I was very impressed by his analysis and the wealth of detailed information he included, much of which was entirely new to me. His coverage of some of these important matters was quite extensive and he provided an important perspective I hadn’t previously encountered anywhere else. Therefore, we are republishing his Substack posts and adding him as a regular columnist to our website:

• The Chinese Perspective
  Hua Bin • The Unz Review

In addition, I’m excerpting major portions of his posts and aggregating them for this article, while retaining all his original bolding and without correcting his very minor typos.

Comparing the Chinese and American Economies

Given his business background, it’s hardly surprising that a number of his posts focused on economic matters, and these included his first, debunking the myth of Chinese underconsumption that has become so widespread among hostile Western leaders and the mainstream media outlets that function as their echo chambers. He began by emphasizing that many of the largest expenses for American consumers simply didn’t exist in China:

Very importantly, Chinese consumers spend far less on big ticket service items – rental (China home ownership is over 90% compared with 60% in the US), healthcare (largely free or heavily subsidized), and education (free public education all the way through university and graduate school).

He went on to provide a long list of important comparison points, many of which would probably surprise even well-informed Americans.

It’s not just Chinese consumers spend less to get same, they actually consumer quite a lot given the nominal per capita GDP is less than 20% of US:

• China has the largest global retail goods sales, 20% larger than US, at dollar value without adjusting for purchasing power
• China auto sales was 30 million units in 2023 compared with 15 million in the US
• 13 million residential units were sold in China in 2023 (after 3 years’ negative growth) compared with 4 million sold in the US
• China accounts for 30% global luxury goods sales, even in economic downturn, 2X of US
• China is the largest outbound tourist country with 200 million outbound trips made a year
• China leads the world in sales of mobile phones, LED TV, home electronics, sporting goods and a lot of other consumer goods by a wide margin
• China consumers 1/3 of electricity generated in the world, reaching 8000 terrawatt hours last year compared with 4000 terrawatt hours for the US
• China has surpassed the US in per capita daily calorie and protein intake
• Chinese life expectancy is 78.6 compared with 77.5 in the US, when 18% of US GDP is in the healthcare sector and 7% in China
• Chinese graduates over 5 million STEM college students a year verse 800,000 in the US
• Chinese total household debt is $11 trillion vs $17.8 trillion in the US
• Chinese total household savings is $2 trillion vs. $911 billion in the US
• According to the Federal Reserve, 40% Americans cannot cover with $400 unexpected expense. I don’t know any comparable number for the Chinese

Based on data, I think it’s safe to argue Chinese consumers don’t underspend compared with global average or even over-consumption countries like the US. They certainly have a bigger cushion in the form of savings and much less indebted.

He freely admitted that one difficulty that China currently faced was finding suitable employment for large numbers of its college-educated youths, who are unwilling to work in the factories as so many of their parents had done. Therefore:

…there are 30 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the country. As a result, China has the world’s highest adoption of robotics – 50% of all robots sold in the world is in China.

Meanwhile, American society has solved this same problem by providing an enormous number of highly-paid service jobs, but it’s unclear whether most of these actually create any net value for our society and our economy:

The US does produce a lot more service industry jobs (80% GDP) vs. China (55%). There is clearly more bankers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, insurance agents, PR specialists, stock brokers, computer programmers, real estate agents, health workers in the US. As a result, the average American consumes a lot more services offered by these professions. China produces more (manufacturing GDP at 32% GDP) than US (10%). Therefore, Chinese consumers buy a lot and the country also exports a lot.

A second myth that Hua addressed in a November post was that of Chinese “overcapacity.” But this actually amounted to a euphemistic Western way of admitting that its own business enterprises could not compete with those of China. Such accusations were often coupled with complaints that many Chinese businesses are state-owned rather than private.

However, as he pointed out, this criticism seemed logically inconsistent. America’s reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of that ideological framework.

Instead, he argued that the ultimate ownership structure of such companies mattered less than whether the marketplace in which they operated was sufficiently competitive, and in many sectors such widespread competition was far more the case in China than in America:

While there is a mix of different types of ownerships (including fully foreign-owned like Tesla) in China, major players in these industries in the US are entirely privately owned.

In all these fields, China is pulling ahead or improving faster than the US for a critical reason – the marketplaces are simply more competitive in China. Ownership simply has no effect on enterprise/industry competitiveness.

In the electric automative sector, the US has one big player Tesla while China has BYD, Cherry, Great Wall, Nio, Xpeng, Li, Huawei, Xiaomi, and dozens more as well as Tesla.

In mobile phones, the US has one single player Apple while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Vivo, Oppo, and also Apple and Samsung.

In ecommerce, the US has Amazon (with eBay at a distant No 2 with a fraction of Amazon’s market share) while China has Alibaba, JD, PDD, Douyin/TikTok Shopping and also Amazon and eBay (before they pulled out after losing the competition). Same is true for almost all other critical industries.

The secret of economic success is NOT ownership but rather the presence of competition (i.e. market). Competition leads to intense pressure to innovate, improve quality, and reduce costs. It leads to an expansion of capacity and scale as businesses try to compete and win. It leads to true meritocracy – i.e. may the best player win.

On the other hand, lack of competition leads to monopoly and stagnation as the players underinvest, pursue barriers against competition, and raise margins/prices. You can do an industry by industry analysis for US businesses and find out the level of concentration (thus lack of competition) very easily.

I would argue China is a far more market-oriented economy than the US in most industries. This is the underlying reason for China’s competitiveness and the so-called “overcapacity”. The US attempts to undermine China’s competitiveness will get nowhere because the Chinese do not buy into its self-serving “neoliberal” economic policies.

The severe consequences of such lack of market competition in America was most obviously apparent in the military sector. Thus, despite our gargantuan military spending, we have been completely unable to match Russia’s far smaller economy in producing the munitions being expended in the Ukraine war:

One interesting manifestation of the US problem with its monopolistic private sector is its inability to keep up weapons production to support the Ukraine war. Its military industrial complex is plagued with undercapacity, high cost, and low efficiency despite having the world’s largest military budget (by an enormous margin). The consolidation of the vaulted military-industrial complex into 5 giants has led to a lack of competition and accountability in most parts of the defence acquisition system. It has led to undercapacity and extreme high costs (of course high margins).

Today while these private defence contractors boast the highest revenue and market cap globally, the US cannot even produce sufficient basic ammunitions such as 155′ artillery shells let alone missiles, warships, fighters and other sophisticated weapons at scale. If the US cannot outcompete production against Russia, what is its chance against China, the world’s largest industrial powerhouse? China’s “overcapacity” issue is indeed a nightmare for the US.

A couple of days later, Hua published a post focusing on the GDP comparisons between China and the U.S. made by Western media outlets. These have always heavily favored the latter country, but he suggested that some of them were highly misleading.

First, he argued that the Chinese government had been entirely correct in bursting the country’s huge real estate bubble. By contrast, the American government had allowed its own similar housing bubble to grow unchecked prior to 2008, ultimately resulting in the devastating financial collapse of that year. He also supported the deliberate shift away from consumer tech and the deflation of the stock market bubble, policies that he argued had been beneficial despite their very negative portrayal in Western media:

However, the reality is that bursting the overpriced and over-leveraged real estate bubble is a necessity and arguably long overdue; consumer tech is absorbing too much resources and leading to short-sighted oligarchies and unsustainable wealth disparity; and the stock market is never a reliable indicator of either overall Chinese economic performance or individual business performance anyways. BYD, the EV maker, now trades lower than 5 years ago despite the fact it dethroned Tesla as the global EV leader in early 2024 and its sales have grown severalfold.

He went on to note that the headline GDP figures seized upon by Western media outlets failed to consider numerous crucial elements:

Ignoring the obvious difference in nominal market exchange GDP vs. Purchasing Power Parity GDP which puts the size of Chinese economy a third bigger than the US already, I have focused only on nominal GDP comparison for simplicity.

Here are some interesting factoids I uncovered (everything can be referenced from sources such as Statista, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, China National Bureau of Statistics):

1. Imputations: this refers to “economic output” that is NOT traded in the marketplace but assigned a value in GDP calculation. One example is the imputed rental of owner-occupied housing, which estimate how much rent you would have to pay if your own house was rented to you. This value is included in the reported GDP in the US. Another example is the treatment of employer-provided health insurance, which estimates how much health insurance you would pay yourself if it was not provided by employer. Again, this imputation is included in GDP calculation in the US.

As of 2023, such imputations account for $4 trillion in US GDP (round 14% of total).

In China, imputation to GDP is ZERO because China doesn’t recognize the concept of imputed/implied economic output in its statistics compilation. Too bad your house is not assigned an arbitrary “productive value” once you buy it in China

2. Construction: in the US, construction contributes to 4% GDP (roughly $1.1 trillion) while in China, construction contributes to 7% GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion). However, China pours the same amount of concrete in 3 years as the US did in the last century. China imported $128 billion worth of iron ore in 2022 and US imported $1.15 billion in 2021. China produced 1.34 billion tons of steel in 2022 vs. 97 million tons by the US in the same year. China built 45,000 km high speed rail in the past decade and US built none.

Considering all the ports, highways, bridges, apartment buildings China builds every year vs. the US, the almost identical construction value in GDP seems laughable.

This shows the non-sense of comparing US GDP vs China.

3. Professional services: services such as law, accounting, tax, insurance, marketing, etc. account for 13% US GDP ($3.5 trillion) while it accounts for 3% Chinese GDP ($0.5 trillion). There are 1.33 million lawyers in the US vs. 650,000 in China; 1.65 million accountants and auditors in the US vs. 300,000 in China; 59,000 CFAs in the US vs. 4,000 in China. 20,000 lobbyists are registered in Washington DC alone while China has no such profession. And of course, the pay for these jobs is much better in the US, ergo the higher GDP value. There are definitely more lawsuits, insurance transactions, annual tax auditing, and congressional lobbying happening in the US vs China. But it is unclear how that translates into national power.

4. Manufacturing and services: 38% of Chinese GDP comes from manufacturing and 55% from services. In the US, 11% and 88% respectively. Very literally, China is a much more productive force of “hard goods” while US is a post-industrial economy tilted overwhelmingly as a “soft goods” producer. If the day comes for a hot war between the two countries, China is far better prepared for a hard power confrontation.

As an example of the ridiculous factors behind these misleading Western GDP statistics, he pointed out some of the items that the British had chosen to include in their own GDP:

A side note, I also ran across some less wholesome facts when doing research on the subject. I refer to a Financial Times report just for a laugh. In 2014, UK started to include prostitution and illegal drugs in its GDP reporting to the tune of 10 billion pounds a year. This raised the reported UK GDP by 5% in an effort to help the government raise its debt ceiling.

To derive at this number, the statistics bureau had to make some assumptions: “The ONS breakdown estimates that each of the UK’s estimated 60,879 prostitutes took about 25 clients a week in 2009, at an average rate of £67.16. It also estimates that the UK had 38,000 heroin users, while sales of the drug amounted to £754m with a street price of £37 a gram.”

Thus, Western economists have adopted a bizarre framework in which rising levels of crime contribute to the official economic measure of national prosperity.

I strongly agreed with all of his arguments, and his telling point about how the service sector of an economy can be easily manipulated is one that I have previously emphasized as well. Certainly many service industries are absolutely legitimate, necessary, and valuable in a modern economy. But that sector can also be artificially inflated without limit by including the output of individuals who spend their days trading meme stocks or crypto currencies back-and-forth, or who hire each other as diversity-coaches. So I think it is quite enlightening to exclude services and compare the two economies by focusing entirely upon the productive portion of the GDP.

Moreover, although he conservatively relied upon nominal exchange rates in comparing the two GDPs, most analysts agree that the use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) statistics is much more realistic. If we combine these two approaches, the disparity between the real productive GDP of the two countries turns out to be enormous.

Read the Whole Article

The post China vs. America: A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors appeared first on LewRockwell.