“Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun.”

“Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegeiance

Is ruled by expedience.

Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown,

‘Ha, Nazi Schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun.

‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,

Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero.

‘In German oder English I know how to count down,

Und I’m learning Chinese,’ says Wernher von Braun.

Tom Lehrer, Wernher von Braun 1961

“With the American economy struggling and the political system in gridlock, there is one thing everyone in Washington seems to agree on: The Chinese do it better.” Steven Mufson and John Pomfret, The Washington Post, February 28, 2010.

“Here’s our commander in chief, President Obama, talking about clean energy this month: ‘Countries like China are moving even faster….I’m not going to settle for a situation where the United States comes in second place or third place or fourth place in what will be the most important economic engine of the future.’ (ibid.)

“And the nation’s pundit in chief, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even sees some virtue in the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on political power: ‘One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when its led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.’ (ibid.)

“This new Red Scare says a lot about America’s collective psyche at this moment.  A nation with a per capita income of $6,546 – ensconced above Ukraine and below Namibia, according to the International Monetary Fund – is putting the fear of God, or Mao, into our hearts.” (ibid.)

Hmm., have we not heard the likes of this before?  Sydney and Beatrice Webb, drooling over the new Utopia of (Uncle Joe) Stalin’s USSR during the mass purges of the kulak farmers during  the 1930s… Professor Joan Robinson, worshipping at the feet of Mao during the mass purges of the intellectuals who rightly ridiculed his semi-literate  ‘Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung’  Red Book during the 1960s Great Leap Backward in the People’s Republic of China…and Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy Sr.  praising the great achievements of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich during the first stages of the genocide of the Jewish race during the late 1930s… Will we ever learn? Must we always yearn to sacrifice our individual freedoms for the security blanket beguilingly held out to us by the ruthless, amoral men and women who rule their subjects through self-serving dictatorships?

Steven Mufson and John Pumfret thankfully throw cold water on that false aspiration in their splendid article, cited above.  They note, for example, that the People’s Republic replicates Western technology rather than innovating its own. Its green policy is based upon the installation of low-tech rooftop water heaters and low-efficiency photovaltaic panels. For show case installations, it relies on the importation of high-tech photovaltaic panels from the United States.  The quality of its  wind-turbine products lags far behind that of General Electric, and its carbon capture technology is primitive by US standards.  So much, one might say, for its green policies. President Obama, you are surely losing sleep unnecessarily over that issue. Wake up and smell the relatively clean, still somewhat capitalist, air in Washington, DC.

There are those who praise China’s political system for its apparent stability, and its ability to take the long view. They should look further themselves into the fragility of that system of governance. Dictatorships are always vulnerable to displacement by coup d’etat or occasionally even by revolution (remember Mao’s Long March to socialism). They are vulnerable to making really big mistakes. For example, the one-child policy (down the well for many baby girls)  has now created a massive surplus of males in China (a surplus counted at 24 million and rising daily). Almost always such a surplus results in lawlessness and internal upheaval, and external aggression in search of extra women. Watch out North Korea, you may be on the road to complete extinction if all your females are abducted into Mainland China.

The pro-industry policies exploit 600 million Chinese peasants who live without hope, on the poverty line, whose daughter are raided and stolen by the city dwellers much in the way of the Sabine women. Hmm, a new Mao with 600 million armed followers might put quite a dent in the ruling gerontocracy in Beijing, might you not think?  Low quality Chinese products are already plaguing American markets.  What  kind of  low quality products  do you think the Chinese are selling to their own servile population?

The one-child policy carries with it another dreadful cost. As Mufson and Pomfret note, China is going to be the first nation in the world to grow old before it becomes rich. By 2050, the percentage of its population above the age 60 will be higher than in the United States; and in excess of 100 million Chinese will be older than 80. This will impose an enormous burden on small, one child  families in a country where social security is notable for its absence.  Add to this a growing problem of water shortage and any American worries  that China will  out-compete the United States must be viewed as a symptom of paranoia.

So please, Dear Readers, do not throw away your precious  freedoms in pursuit of a ludicrous  illusion of the ‘grass-is-always greener -on-the-other-side’  kind.  Your neighbor’s grass is much less fertilized, much less weeded, and much less cared for under dictatorship than under capitalism. If you do not believe that, at first sight, ask whether you prefer to live next door to home renters or home owners, and why.

The invisible hand of a true market system always out-performs the visible boot of a politically controlled, so-called, market system, even when the latter’s boots are aimed as expertly as in communist China.  Under dictatorship, statistics are easily falsified, especially those relating to quality of output, but also those relating to quantity. Each Province in the People’s Republic produces output statistics that show it to be above the average for the country for a whole.  Now that is quite a statistical feat!

Interesting that the Webbs, the Robinson’s, the Lindbergh’s and the Kennedy’s somehow missed out on that insight, do you not think.  Just who do you think  each of them had in mind as the dictators who would take over, once Britain and the United States  listened to their gifted voices, and  shifted from democracy to dictatorship?

Tags: aging population, discrimination against the peasants in China, free markets out-compete dictatorships, lack of innovation in China, low per capital income in China, low quality production in China, male shortage in China, one-child policy, The People's Republic of China, water scarcity in China