Chinese Capitalism v American Envy [China the enemy]
by Rense Johnson, Chairman, Citizens for Term Limits
The year was 1986. My wife and I landed in Beijing, China on an oil men’s tour that was part of the President Eisenhower’s “People to people” program. Chairman Mao had been dead some 6-10 years. After an interim head guy, Chairman Deng Xiaoping was running things.
It was Deng who introduced Capitalism in China—although he dared not call it that. He called it the “Responsibility System.”
By the time our group got to China, Deng had been in power only three years, but the benefits of his Responsibility System were already evident. Per capita income had already risen dramatically.
“Responsibility System” meant assignment of a quota to each commune, each farm and each factory. And that quota must first be produced for the state. But everything above and beyond the quota belonged to the workers in each group. They could then keep it all. We came away with two solid impressions: Genuine friendliness and industriousness, neither of which could be feigned nor put on for long. We found the populace to be outgoing and welcoming. We also observed that stimulated by the profit motive, the Chinese were working as industriously as ants. There was one instance we saw where at night they worked under floodlights.
Chairman Deng seemed to have grasped the concept that governments cannot produce wealth. They can enable wealth production or inhibit it, but governments cannot produce wealth.
Opportunities for betrayal of the workers were obvious—primarily by manipulation of the quotas upward. But that seemed never to have happened. It would seem that Deng had been smart enough to set the quotas initially high, so that any adjustments could be made in a downward direction. After all, following years under the heel of Chairman Mao any twinkle of freedom would look good, however scant.
An Oklahoma friend who was in China within the past year told me that the Responsibility System is still in effect and still working well. The economy continues to grow dramatically. Although bicycles were the primary mode of transportation when we were there, there is now an abundance of automobiles, together with a modern road and highway system on which to drive them. My friend says that anyone who hasn’t been there in the last five years would not recognize the country.
China’s shortcomings should not be glossed over. In 1989 there was a tremendous student demonstration in Tiananmen Square. Deng put down the demonstration and though accused of “butchering” the students, there are credible American reports that this is an exaggeration.
What is not exaggeration is the one child per family policy, which
involves aborting second children and/or killing unwanted girl babies. This abomination has resulted in an oversupply of adult males with an insufficient supply of women to marry—an unnatural situation.
For all of China’s faults and shortcomings, the comparison with our economy is inescapable. The U.S., with a progressive tax system based on the politics of envy, where additional effort is penalized instead of rewarded, is bound to be overtaken economically by a system which rewards extra hard work.
Additionally, we have the weight of a Congress-created bureaucracy, the very existence of which costs Billions annually, not to mention compliance, the burden of which has been estimated at three-quarters of a Trillion Dollars per year.
Imagine the kind of income tax form a Chinese fills out:
Responsibility Quota: Filled.
Income from additional work: None of Your Business.
Imagine a country without an IRS—one where accountants could
accomplish all the needed functions of accounting, instead of spending time protecting citizens from assaults on their privacy by IRS Agents—Agents who assume the citizens’ guilt until proven innocent instead of “innocent until proven guilty” as prevails elsewhere in our country.
And all of our chickens of surplus weight and burden on our economy are coming home to roost.
Let me read from an article which appeared in June 2003, authored by someone you never heard of, but factual, nevertheless.
“Now, in case you missed it, the White House ‘shelved’ a Treasury
Department commissioned study that showed the net liabilities of our FedGov to be $44.2 trillion. By comparison, our current official debt stands at about $6.4 trillion. Other comparisons: $44.2 trillion is roughly equivalent to four years of US economic output, or more than 94% of all US household assets.” [More recent estimates place the number at $80 trillion.]
We have done this to ourselves. To use a horse race analogy, China is coming up on our outside while we continue to lope along, hugging the rail, looking straight ahead, wearing our blinders.
We gasped when China established a military base close to the Panama Canal, our lifeline between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Well, some of us gasped. Jimmy Carter gave the Canal away with the aid of a complicit Senate. Then Bill Clinton opened it up for them. After all, he owed the Chinese big time for financing both his election campaigns. What has happened to our old reliable Monroe Doctrine?
Gone—without a whimper from our mainstream media.
Recently I read that China had cut a deal with our northern neighbors the Canadians to extract oil from the Athabaska Tar sands, which contain a third of the world’s oil reserves, enough to last us hundreds of years, but are expensive to process. Apparently not too expensive for China when oil from normal sources is selling at $50 per barrel.
In our country, the politics of envy also includes inhibiting those who would find and produce the oil the nation needs to fuel its energy-based economy. Ironically, one reason the price of oil has been driven up is burgeoning Chinese demand for gasoline to fuel all those automobiles now driving back and forth on their new highways.
Yes, capitalism reared its lovely head in China. But alas, in America we still wear our blinders of envy and bureaucracy. After all, aren’t we the greatest nation in the world?
Since writing the foregoing I have come across an article by Wilson C. Lucom, then vice chairman of Accuracy in Media, written in 2003, which is excerpted as follows:
Is one paranoid to think China would ever have a war with the United States?
Would it not be earth-shaking if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly said the United States would have a war with China? It would be headline news in all the newspapers and on the TV networks.
Yet this is exactly what Secretary Rumsfeld’s Chinese equivalent said. Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian publicly said: ‘War [with the United States] is inevitable; we cannot avoid it. The issue is that the Chinese armed forces must control the initiative in this war. ... We must be prepared to fight for one year, two years, or even longer.’ (NewsMax.com, 4-9-01).
When the head of the Chinese armed forces says war with the U.S. is inevitable, you had better believe China is preparing for war with the United States. To our knowledge, not one of the major media told the American people about this statement by Gen. Chi.
[China the enemy]">
[China the enemy]">Send this article to my friend(s).
