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November 28, 2019December 8, 2019

Hong Kong and Thanksgiving in America

On the eve of Thanksgiving in America, it is, I think, most appropriate to write about Hong Kong, and here is why I say so: How Laissez-Faire and Private Property Saved The Pilgrims

Recently, when Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey voiced his excellent support of Hong Kong’s freedom demonstrations — “Fight for freedom,” he wrote, “stand with Hong Kong!” — in direct opposition to Communist China’s authoritarian regime, many of our garden-variety liberals who have been spoiled rotten by America (and for this reason take her entirely for granted) came out swinging at Daryl Morey, who was totally in the right.

Among the most prominent of those garden-variety progressives was none other than LeBron James, one of the many thousands of professional athletes whom the (relative) free-market of America has made into a phenomenally wealthy human. Or perhaps I should say: “African-American male, he/him.”

Please note that in China, LeBron James would not have the legal sanction to his wealth — the product of his labor and talent — nor to the freedom of expression he enjoys here.

Note also what he actually said:

“[Daryl Morey] was misinformed [and] wasn’t educated on the situation at hand.”

Unquote.

In fact, it’s the other way around. Daryl Morey was incontrovertibly educated on the situation at hand.

Hong Kong, as I’ve written about before, is unique among all cities and civilizations in the entirety of human history. The only other place that compares — and it compares for the same reason — is New York City.

The reason that Hong Kong — a small barren, resource-poor rock in the middle of the South China Sea — grew into one of the wealthiest, most civilized and sophisticated places on planet earth, in an incredibly short amount of time, may be summed up in a short phrase:

Laissez-nous faire.

Hong Kong is an absolutely irrefutable testament to the elegant order of laissez faire — true laissez-faire. Which is not a mixed economy, nor a crony capitalist economy, both of which things, incidentally, in one way or another, no matter the continent or country, virtually all people today are calling for more of.

The person most responsible for Hong Kong’s meteoric rise to the greatness of an unmatched civilization (because of its explicit implementation of laissez-faire) is a person you’ve perhaps never heard of: Sir John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006).

As Lawrence W. Reed — not the same Mr. Reed who wrote the timeless essay titled I, Pencil which, in many ways, is the only thing you’ll ever need to know — put it:

“Some of us just write about pro-freedom ideas. This guy actually made them public policy for millions.”

Quoting from:

The Man Behind the Hong Kong Miracle

If we are to believe the critics [of laissez-faire], Hong Kong must be a veritable Hell’s Kitchen of greed, poverty, exploitation and despair.

Not so. Not even close.

Maybe this is why socialists don’t like to talk about Hong Kong: It’s not only the freest economy, it’s also one of the richest. Its per capita income, at 264 percent of the world’s average, has more than doubled in the past 15 years. People don’t flee from Hong Kong. They flock to it. [Sounds a little like racist, fascist America.] At the close of World War II, the population numbered 750,000. Today it’s nearly ten times that, at 7.1 million.

Positive Non-Interventionism

The one man most responsible for [Hong Kong’s] perennial achievement: Sir John James Cowperthwaite should forever occupy top shelf in the pantheon of great free-thinkers….

Compare Britain—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set—with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its former mother country.

A Scot by birth, Cowperthwaite attended Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh and then studied classics at St Andrews University and at Christ’s College at Cambridge. He served in the British Colonial Administrative Service in Hong Kong during the early 1940s. After the war he was asked to come up with plans for the government to boost economic growth. To his credit, he had his eyes open and noticed that the economy was already recovering quite nicely without government direction. So while the mother country lurched in a socialist direction at home under Clement Attlee, Cowperthwaite became an advocate of what he called “positive non-interventionism” in Hong Kong. Later as the colony’s Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, he personally administered it.

“Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century’s ‘hidden hand’ than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism,” Cowperthwaite declared in 1962. “In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.”

He didn’t like protectionism or subsidies even for new, so-called “infant” industries:

“An infant industry, if coddled, tends to remain an infant industry and never grows up or expands.” He believed firmly that “in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”

Ever since the days of John Maynard Keynes, economics has been cursed by the notion that human action should be distilled into numbers, which then become a “pretense to knowledge” for central planner types. In many collegiate economics courses, it’s hard to tell where the math leaves off and the actual economics begins. To Cowperthwaite, the planner’s quest for statistics was anathema. So he refused to compile them. When the economist Milton Friedman asked him in 1963 about the “paucity of statistics,” Cowperthwaite answered:

“If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”

If that sounds quaintly backward or archaic, let me remind you that the biggest economic flops of the past century were both centrally planned and infatuated with numbers. Whole ministries were devoted to their compilation because even lousy numbers gave the planners the illusion of control. But not in Hong Kong!

Statistics, no matter how accurate or voluminous, are no substitute for sound principles. Powered by an abundance of the latter under Cowperthwaite, the Hong Kong economy soared during his tenure. Writing in the November 2008 issue of The Freeman, Andrew P. Morriss noted that in his decade as financial secretary, “real wages rose by 50 percent and the portion of the population in acute poverty fell from 50 to 15 percent.” It’s hard to argue with success. After Cowperthwaite’s retirement in 1971, less principled successors dabbled in social welfare spending but they financed it through land sales, not increased taxation. Tax rates to this day are right where the old man left them.

(Link)

Lebron James last year came out in support of former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, saying: “I stand with anyone who believes in change.”

“Anyone?,” David Harsanyi recently wrote in direct response to this robotic platitude, and continued: “Of course, LeBron’s stand, as with most acts of pretend celebrity bravery, resulted in hosannas being thrown at him by the press, and, more importantly, never costing him a penny. [Spoiled] Americans [who are so spoiled that they don’t know how good they’ve got it] tend to use word like ‘stand’ and ‘fight’ in their political disagreements, although they never really have to stand and fight for anything. Tank Man stood and fought. The Hong Kong protesters stand and fight. We take to social media and argue. Posting a Nike-approved picture on your Instagram account of Kaepernick—adorned with the $40-million market-test slogan, ‘Believe in something, Even if it means sacrificing everything’—is not an act of bravery, LeBron.”

I don’t know that truer words have ever been spoken.

Finally, there’s an even deeper benefit to laissez-faire — true laissez-faire — one that is an elaboration upon the elegance of laissez-faire’s economic order: that benefit is the genuine harmony and goodwill, the unity and non-factionalizing among people, which a policy of live-and-let live brings with it.

That is why Hong Kong’s current generation is fighting so furiously and uncompromisingly: because they knew freedom. They had it. They lived it. They saw its goodness firsthand, its rightness, its inherent, inalienable justice. And many of them know also that the moment those freedoms are stripped by an authoritarian regime and its immense propaganda machine takes hold, entrenchment will set in, and those beautiful civilizing freedoms will be gone forever.

They fight with so much passion and beauty because they know that to lose it will be to lose it irrevocably. They know they must win. And they must. It is do or die, and they sense this, and my admiration for them knows no bounds, because they are up against a leviathan-sized Borg, utterly mindless, the “coldest of all cold monsters,” as Nietzsche well said, “who bites with stolen teeth” — the state.

I’ve been watching Hong Kong every single day, sometimes minute-by-minute, and this recent thread, written by a native Hong-Kongian, captures precisely what I mean about the natural harmony that exists among humans when humans are left alone:

Compare these passionate, brave, freedom-loving people with the spoiled-rotten ANTIFA and Occupy illiterates — whom the police they hate are in this country protecting their right to free speech which ANTIFA would abolish, and who would have us emulate something much closer to China’s authoritarian government — and it will either enrage you, or bring you to your knees:

Happy Thanksgiving.

October 20, 2015October 22, 2015

Bernie Sanders Praises China For Its Maternity Policy(!)

Check this out:

Bernie Sanders tweeted that yesterday, and it’s pretty damn awesome.

Perhaps Bernie is unaware that the Chinese regime has also, for a very long time now, been killing female infants in order to control their population.

Perhaps he’s unaware of China’s notoriously barbaric one-child policy.

Perhaps he’s forgotten about all the forced abortions.

Or perhaps, like the socialist Sierra Club — which has explicitly advocated that “state and federal laws be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families” — Bernie Sanders also supports this sort of authoritarian regime.

I find that last thing the most likely. Why?

Because all the sinuous roads of socialism — whether democratic, progressive, welfare-statist, or communistic — lead to precisely that: government control of the individual.

October 16, 2015

Obama’s February, March 2015 Golf Vacations and Fundraisers Cost Taxpayers Over 4 Million in Travel Expenses Alone

There’s nothing I love more than being lectured by sanctimonious liberals on, for instance, not “taking action on climate change,” or the importance of energy conservation, or the sins of profligacy, et cetera.

I love it even more when I’m being lectured by sanctimonious liberals who are simultaneously engaged in high hypocrisy:

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force revealing that Barack Obama’s February and March 2015 travel for golf vacations and fundraisers totaled $4,436,245.50 in taxpayer-funded transportation expenses. The documents regarding the Obama travel expenses came in response to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by Judicial Watch.

To date, the Secret Service has not provided requested information, as required by FOIA, regarding security costs.

Using the Air Force’s official cost estimate of $206,337 per hour, the newly released records obtained by Judicial Watch show:

Obama’s February 14, 2015, golf outing to Palm Springs required a five-hour flight, costing taxpayers a total of $1,031,685.

Transportation for Obama’s February 19 day trip to Chicago cost taxpayers $619,011.00.

Transportation for Obama’s March 2015 fundraising trip to Los Angeles cost taxpayers $1,980,835.20.

Obama’s March 28, 2015, golf outing to Palm city required a 3.9-hour flight, costing taxpayers $804,870.3
In Palm Springs, Obama played golf at the luxurious Sunnylands country club, located on the former estate of the late ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg. Obama reportedly spent the weekend on the exclusive, gated property, where he has twice stayed before.

Obama’s February trip to Chicago was billed by the White House as a non-political event to declare the Pullman Historic District a national monument. But, press reports indicated that the trip was heavily political. In a CNN story entitled, “Obama gives Emanuel re-election boost:”

President Barack Obama went to Chicago bearing gifts Thursday for his former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel … But the day had all the trappings of a campaign – and Obama even made an unannounced stop at a Kenwood campaign office for Emanuel on his way out of town. “I’m glad he’s my mayor, and I’m glad he’s going to be my mayor for another four years,” Obama told volunteers.

Obama’s travel to California was solely to raise money for the Democratic National Committee and to show his support for fellow Democrats nationwide. His visit to Los Angeles began with an appearance on ABC’s late night comedy program “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and continued on to include a “roundtable discussion” fundraiser hosted at the Santa Monica home of ICM Partners cofounder Chris Silbermann and his wife Julia Franz. Guests paid up to $33,400 per couple for attendance, donations that will be used to aid DNC activities during the approaching 2016 election cycle. Obama’s March 12 fundraising trip to Los Angeles was his 32nd fundraiser in L.A. County since he became president.

In Palm City, Obama played golf at the “spectacular” Floridian National Golf Club, where members pay a $50,000 initiation fee and $15,000 in annual dues. According to the resort’s website, “This stunning, yet formidable par 71 will certainly impress. At 7,114 yards, the 18-hole course offers perfectly manicured rolling fairways and greens, demanding hazards, breathtaking views of the St. Lucie River, and is surrounded by natural preserve and native wildlife.”

“Taxpayers should be outraged that Barack Obama’s wastes 4.4 million of their precious tax dollars on golf vacations and political fundraising,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Secret Service has simply refused to respond to our requests for documents about the security costs of these controversial trips. The Obama travel scandal is about abuse of office, abuse of the taxpayer, and contempt for the rule of law.”

Records released earlier this year by Judicial Watch showed that Michelle Obama’s 2014 trip to China cost more than $360,000 in air transportation costs. Judicial Watch uncovered an expensive combination of trips by the Obamas to Africa and Honolulu, which cost taxpayers $15,885,585.30 in flight expenses. The single largest prior known expense for accommodations was for Michelle Obama’s side-trip to Dublin, Ireland, during the 2013 G-8 conference in Belfast, when she and her entourage booked 30 rooms at the five-star Shelbourne Hotel, with the first lady staying in the 1500 square-foot Princess Grace suite at a cost of $3,500 a night. The total cost to taxpayers for the Obamas’ Ireland trip was $7,921,638.66. To date, the known travel expenses of the Obamas and Vice President Joe Biden exceed $61million.

(Source)

It’s good to be king and queen, n’est ce pas?

June 5, 2015June 5, 2015

Tank Man

Or the “Unknown Rebel,” as he’s sometimes called:

So small and yet so large.

That photo is of course from Tiananmen Square, twenty-six years ago today, when the entire world watched an anonymous Chinese man stand alone in front of advancing tanks, not backing down in the face of communist totalitarianism.

Surely, it’s one of the defining photos of the 20th Century, but let us also not forget Chengdu:

June 4th indeed marks the twenty-sixth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China–when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.

June 4, 2014

Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Five Year Anniversary — But Do You Know About Chengdu?

Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was twenty-five years ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-fifth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.

June 4, 2013

Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Four Year Anniversary

Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was over two decades ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-four year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.

June 10, 2011June 11, 2011

Dalai Lama Discloses How Unenlightened He Is

The Dalai Lama — a nominal voice for platitudes of “peace and compassion,” and whom many regard as a kind of messiah — just recently revealed how unenlightened he actually is, telling a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, that he, the Dalai Lama, is, (and I quote) “a Marxist” — though, he hastened to add, “not a Leninist.”

This, understand, is coming not from a Barack Obama type, who preaches Marxism all while enjoying the benefits and comforts and wealth that capitalism brings, but rather from a man who has experienced firsthand the atrocities of Marxism. It is, when you stop and think about it, an amazing thing. From journalist Tsering Namgyal:

Last week, when the Dalai Lama was in Minneapolis, I had a chance to go to a conference attended by nearly 150 Chinese students. Luckily, I ended up being privy to a fascinating meeting. I sat at the back of the slightly-overheated and jam-packed conference hall of a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and the Dalai Lama engaged with the students on topics ranging from Mao to Marxism to China-Tibet relations.

… Midway through the conversation, His Holiness, much to their surprise, told them “as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist.” “But not a Leninist,” he clarified.

During the question and answer session, a student said that the Marxists these days criticize consumerism because they do not understand the difference between “consumption” and “consumerism.” He also asked about the contradiction inherent in the Dalai Lama’s economic philosophy and Marx’s critique of religion. The Tibetan leader answered that the Marx was not against religion or religious philosophy per se but against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx’s time, with the European ruling class. He also provided an interesting anecdote about his experience with Mao. He said that Mao had felt that the Dalai Lama’s mind was very logical, implying that Buddhist education and training help sharpens the mind. He said he met with Mao several times, and that once, during a meeting in Beijing, the Chinese leader called him in and announced: “Your mind is scientific!”—an assessment that was followed by the famous line, ”religion is poison.”

…Marxism, purported to be the guiding philosophy of the Chinese Community Party, has been replaced by American style capitalism in China. But the author of Das Kapital must be laughing in his grave for gaining new converts in the West, particularly in the academia, following the global financial crisis.

(Link)

June 3, 2011May 15, 2013

Tiananmen Square Twenty-Two Year Anniversary

June 4th marks the twenty-two year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force, which is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

January 19, 2010September 27, 2011

Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop To Drink

The most obvious place to begin any real discussion of water is in pointing out that right now on planet earth, water in its potable form is about the most abundant resource there is. No one even passingly acquainted with the subject seriously disputes this.

In the words of water specialist Fredrik Segerfeldt: “Water is a finite resource. In principle, though, the supply of water is so great as to be infinite for all human purposes” (Water For Sale, 2005, p. 13).

No less than that notoriously leftward-leaning institution called the United Nations reported: “The world uses only 8 percent of the total water that exists on the planet.”

The UN adds: “Water is a renewable resource [and thus] can be used over and over again” (Water for People, Water for Life: The United Nations World Water Development Report, 2002).

Among even slightly less liberal hydrologists, however, this 8 percent figure is regarded as high.

Here are a few more water statistics for you to guzzle down:

Two-thirds of the earth is water.

The vast majority of that is either salt water or frozen water.

Salt water evaporates and comes back to the earth in the form of fresh water.

The amount of water on the planet is static. Which means: all the water that exists on earth has, for the most part, always existed on earth. The amount remains essentially the same because water recycles itself through evaporation and precipitation.

Currently, two and a half million liters of water are available each year for every man, woman, and child on the planet. This translates to about 19,000 liters per day, per person, which is an astronomically large amount, certainly far more water than any one person could consume in an entire month, let alone one day.

Water can be desalinated (i.e. converted from salt water into fresh water) relatively easily and inexpensively.

Even in the midst of such overwhelming abundance, there is a water crisis in the world.

Why?

“The problem,” says Terry Anderson, of Montana State University, “is that water is often found in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The reason water is frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time is that “it’s cheaper than it should be, which causes people to overuse it.”

Why is it cheaper than it should be?

In a phrase, government subsidies.

As a result, we find ourselves ceaselessly subject to the mantra-like chanting of enviros: “Conserve water, use less water, put bricks in your toilets, don’t flush, take shorter showers (if you must shower at all), use 5 gallons less per day.” Et cetera.

Let us examine briefly how effective these conservation measures really are — and how necessary.

To begin with, it should be noted that far and away the majority of water used is not used for direct consumption, nor for bathing, toilet flushing, or watering the lawn, all of which constitute only a tiny fraction. Rather, the vast majority of water is used for agriculture.

Thus, since crops require X amount of water to grow and flourish, the conservation measures that are espoused by enviros add up to such an insignificant amount of water saved that it might as well be flushed down the toilet.

Quoting the economist Julian Simon:

“The ridiculousness of such ‘conservation’ measures as not putting water on the tables of restaurants or not flushing the toilet every time is discussed in a later chapter.”

Enviros have many responses to such statements, but having listened to them all for decades now, I assure you that they all stem from the exact same principle: an utter unwillingness to believe that the entire ecological philosophy is predicated upon, and propagated by means of, an ideology whose every major premise is fraudulent.

Fully 80 to 90 percent of water, then, is used in agriculture. That is the reason water used in agriculture is so sensitive to price.

The reason there are cases of absolute shortage and rationing is that price is not allowed to respond to market conditions, but rather is fixed at a low subsidized price in many agricultural areas. For example, farmers near Fresno, California pay $17 for an acre-foot of water, while according to the U.S. General Accounting Office the ‘full cost’ is $42 a foot. In some areas in California farmers pay $5 per acre-foot, whereas the Los Angles water authorities pay $500 per acre-foot. Such subsidies encourage farmers to plant crops that use water heavily, which diverts water from urban areas…. Water economists are agreed that if governments stop subsidizing water to farmers, and allow water to be bought and sold freely, water shortages would no longer appear. But bureaucratic government restrictions often prevent those who have rights to more water than they need from selling their water rights to those who are willing to pay for the water; the bureaucrats fight tooth and nail to protect their own powers, and the results are amazing stories of governmentally caused inefficiency and true scarcity leading to [government supervised] rationing (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, p. 153).

The environmental solution — which, tacitly or explicitly, the rightwing has also at least partially accepted — is this: create more laws to prevent new infrastructures from being developed, which infrastructures also transport water from places where there is too much water to places where there is too little. Instead, let us institute coercive conservation measures that ultimately add up to too little water to make a noticeable difference.

The forgotten factor in this is the private sector — forgotten because, according to both rightwing and left, lobbyists, pressure groups, and bureaucrats alike are all better suited to run our lives and the life of the economy than the individuals who make up that society and that society’s economy.

We see the evidence of the above principle in practice every day: the private businessman, the private taxpayer — in short, the individual — are each subordinate to whatever given pressure group pushes the hardest to get its agenda passed. Right now of course it’s “climate change.”

With regard to water, though, what is finally the point? Profligacy and wanton waste? Coercive conservation laws to better “preserve” miniscule amounts of water, which in actuality is a stupendously abundant resource?

No, neither.

The point is to let the law of supply and demand work.

To objectify this, take a quick look at the present-day history of Macao, China, starting in about 1985, when authorities signed a concession contract with a private water industry. The results: the greatest leap in quantity and quality of water in all of Asia.

Then take a look at the massive $3.4 billion water projects planned by the massive left-wing Peruvian government in 1993, which ended it total failure and waste.

The Bolivian example — which Fredrik Segerfeldt also discusses in his book — often used by interventionists to show how privatization putatively doesn’t work, reveals in fact the opposite, and highlights also the nature of crony capitalism: specifically, the then-mayor of Cochabamba wouldn’t allow the city’s water supply to be privatized until a dam was included in the (sweetheart) deal, and his friends were thus put in charge of building that dam. The failure of the Cochabamba water infrastructure can in large part be blamed on that very dam, but even more damning than that are the bureaucrats who don’t enforce laws on public water managers.

Says Segerfeldt:

[After Chile] introduced private ownership of water in the 1980s, water supply has grown faster than in any other country. Thirty years ago, only 27 percent of Chileans in rural areas and 63 percent of urban communities had steady access to safe water. Today’s figures are 94 and 99 percent, respectively — the highest for all the world’s medium-income countries” (Water For Sale, p. 31).

Or the Mahaweli Development Program in Sri Lanka that took “44 percent of all public investment,” the costs of which “rose so high as to make the new farmland hugely expensive, forcing government to then subsidize the land,” and which in turn “created severe social tensions, because the money for the subsidies had to be taken from other items of expenditure, and because those allotted lands were considered to have obtained unfair advantages” (Fredrik Segerfeldt, Water For Sale, p. 20).

Or take a look at Ethiopia’s titanic bureaucratic nightmare called the Water Management Program in the 1990’s, where “eight different authorities were involved … resulting in much unnecessary duplication and heavy wastage … Added to which large parts of the country were still left out of the water and sewerage networks” (Ibid, p 21).

This is the sort of gross ineptitude — inherent, almost by definition, to governmental bureaucracy of any kind — that your rightwing and leftwing brothers and sisters have so much confidence in, and in turn would have you place all your confidences in.

Don’t do it.

Not for the thing most vital to life: H2O.