Rush Limbaugh asked the question. Who would have imagined that we would be jealous of the Chinese?
Just as the Irish emigrated to the US to escape hunger and poverty during the 19th century, can you imagine the unemployed in the US deciding to pull up stakes and moving to China?
2 comments:
Instead of gnashing our teeth, we ought to be looking at what China is doing to grow their economy. For too long we've refused to take ideas from other countries, because of our arrogant belief that we are the greatest in every way. Time to swallow our pride and look at the best practices of other countries.
I don't remember Mead discussing this idea in the essay you linked. But maybe I didn't read it carefully enough.
IIRC, he is concerned with the possibility of increasing violence in the black inner city; he discusses a number of historical reasons for the fading hopes of the black communities (which were never monolithic) but he does so from the pov of an old-fashioned liberal.
IOW, he's high-minded, a good analyst, but falls far short of having any real ideas for moving forward.
He's just one more voice in the Greek chorus wailing Armageddon tunes. That music sells.
Only someone who had never studied China's massive problems would envy them. They're not standing outside the global economy waiting for things to go sideways. Behind the facade they're scrambling desperately to suppress the weekly riots (they sure can suppress the reports about them) and to find solutions to their own horrific problems.
Only problem is, when you're a Maoist, every problem looks like it might have a "Five-Year Plan" solution.
Many companies that left the US for the cheaper, greener grass of China found out to their chagrin that it really *is* astroturf. Cheap, shoddy astroturf. So they're beginning to come home.
China is densely resistant to the notion of a free-market economy though it permits mom-n-pop places to exist. But as a guiding economic philosophy? Heck no.
Using shoddy, corner-cut Chinese products can get you dead.
If Rush Limabaugh is jealous of the Chinese, then he's losing his touch. It's like being jealous of a seriously ill leper who has managed to disguise his disease with a spiffy wardrobe.
Rush Limbaugh?? Who'da thunk??
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