Flattered, Joe. I think you'd also enjoy following the dialogue I've been having with a US foreign policy expert on China and the Bush doctrine.

Also on your point on India, you should read this first

Freedomist Leftyblogger

Talk about an oxymoron, well unless he is an anarchist radical libertarian something or other.

Otherwise, its a term that cancels itself out

freedom and left are opposites

(so would a monarchist authoritarian right, but that dont exist in america ... where a far rightist quotes Jefferson, Heyek Patrick Henry and John Stewart Mill and hold up the torch of limited republican goverment the bill of rights the declaration of independence, lower taxes, property rights, and equality under the law.)

So what the hell is a Freedomist Lefty ,, its a contridiction in terms. Mr Orewll here is showing a bit of a smirk.

Im not so sure that China is doomed ... the lack of freedom and the enviroment where ideas are either enough to get you killed, or something you cant benifit from unless you leave china to a land where your you can benifit personaly from your own ideas... I agree it does stifle ..

But China can still do well taking its skim off the top, our own socialist burden is greater than china (not just per capita, but in gross numbers)

So even if they didnt have slave labor, they could still overtake us because their govt dont confiscate as much ...

As long as they allow the ruthless enforcer of profit margin et al work its corrective magic on those that take/waste/embezzle too much,,,,,

Facism isnt wrong because it dont work ... because it can, wont work as well, but it will work.

Facism is wrong because of the evil, the laogai prison factories have 8 million people working in slave labor unto death and the ability to grab replacments off the streets at will.

The chinese have abandoned the Socialist failure, But you can have a induastrial economy under kings and tsars, and it will work. not well, but good enough.

The USA is still strangling itself with leftover socialism, 40% and more of the cost of everything is the compound taxation that hampers the poor from having any better life because the govt confiscates his land via state and school taxes.

If he hangs out at the scrapyard and tralers home steel poles and tin to build his shop .. the govt will come along and slap a 100,000 $ tax value on it forcing him to cut it down before he can even get started.

This leftist attack on the poor is designed to keep them poor .. and strangle out the startups via "tax the rich" schemes designed as an attack on america.

The idea is to strangle the best thing about america as much as possible ,, to the left, the ability to create your own job must be destroyed, and they havce made a lot of progress with their anti-american "compassion" program to trap everyin in poverty.

This leaves only the large corp levithans, the abode of the leftist elite you see in middle managment on down ... and inclusding the top, who see it as a way for the govt to help maintain their monopoly by leftist "tax the rich" attacks on the little guy ...

China dont have these problems ... they have a freedom problem ... but they will simply steal our ideas from us .. we supply them with know how and quality control .. they supply the land the power and the buildings and the near slave labor, and they take the skim off the top ..

In Russia the olygarchs are at odds with the govt ... in China the Robber barrons ARE the govt ..

A setup not very different from france, where the corp levithans are not the same people as the govt but they are holding hands ...

I dont share the pessimism about china ... my problem with China is the Freedom Deficit .. the Liberty deficit, the rights of the individual is missing .. so yes they wont do as well as they could do ...

But the overbearing USA govt the high property taxes, built in compound property and income taxes, regulatory burdends that increase costs,, that represent 40%+ of the price of a loaf of bread ... does put us at a structual disatvantage with china ...

What china lacks is productivity, but that will fix itself as they increase their inventory of machine tooling, learn how to alloy metals etc.

As productivity increases, they will have the returns to begin increasing energy eff and start controlling polution.

China is a good example of Facist Italy and National Socialism model of leftism, Den Xao Pengs Capitalist Roader Socialism.

Will the pot boil over somewhere ? .. what ? Like Teinamen ? .. unlike the Euro-commies, the Sino-Commies still have the will to lock off the exits and squish em all with tanks.

And they have no left-liberals attempting to destroy them from within like we do ,, they dont have "tax the rich" attacks on american new businesses to make sure the underclass has no future ... the left have already crushed most of the family farms and all is owned by prudential Betrice and Fleming foods et al ...

China dont have this problem .. they have a robber barron economy and the west provide all the technology they need .. and their skim looks small compared to our own socialist leftist toxin that poisons America.

So despite the fact that their conditions are not ideal to maximize growth and create widespread shared wealth, dont forget that we are also poisoning ourselves even more than they are ..

The property taxes alone exterminates much of our would have been new entries into the economy, and the govt buying up land, put land further out of reach of the little guy.

And this is a knife to the chest of our future, not deep enough to reach the heart, but with the strangling property and income taxes, leaves us a walking wounded.

China can succeed not because they are doing everything right, but because of where we started going wrong when the leftist plan to destroy America as a free country began to be implimented.

Attacking us at all levels ,, morals, economy, Liberty and Property, Freedom ..

Look to Socialist Europe at your future, take no confort from their advanced state of damage from the leftist toxin, because we are going the same place ,, only slower so that they left us behind on the road to leftist failure. but we are still following,, more leftism than just income taxes mist be cut and abolished .. but the property taxes too ,, the govt must also stop buying land and sell it all off again etc.

Dirt poor blacks in the south owned their own land

Then lefty debbie do gooder came along and taxed it away and pushed all the poor off their land,, then had the govt start buying up land to put it out of reach ... thankfully, the ability to use land to create wealth with farms and shops, and to retain unconfiscated earnings to expand and build a better life isnt the only road out of poverty in America ..

It was once one of the most common however, which is why the left destroyed it, hoping to defeat America.
...
A real Freedomist isnt focused on capitalism, he dont really care about capitalism

Capitalism is a side effect of Freedom,, A free man will trade .. but thats not whats important to a Freedomist .. its the freedom not the capitalism

Course, you prevent capitalism by the cancel of freedom, and a Freedomist dont want his freedom canceled.

Freedom will have capitalism ... but capitalism does not require freedom ...

I wouldnt be so arrogant about China, a robber barron economy will function quite well thank you very much ,, they are getting all the tech they need from the west. we are bringing all our tech to them, to have them manufacture it all for us.

Moraly acceptable Capitalism is the voluntary trade between free people .. not the skim off the labor of slaves.

What they are missing is the respect for the freedom and Liberty of the individual, and that is a MORAL argument, not an economic one.

I hate Mao's Communism and Dengs Capitalism for the same reason .. No Freedom.

LaFreniere is quite clear that he considers himself a leftist. Read him, and (like Norm Geras) I suspect you'll see what I'm talking about.

I happen to believe that they're a doomed species within modern leftism, but in the meantime I applaud their efforts and am proud to call them friends.

Points re: China were long, bit food for thought. You'll be pleased to know that Simon World shares some of your perspective.

Yes, Simonworld's Daily Linklets are essential reading for all us China residents. However, Simon, like this site, regularly links to blogspot and other long-since blocked in China sites which is infuritating for us China residents.

I can understand people living outside of China easily forgetting about us but I would beg you to please, in future, speare us a thought next time youy link to a killer Blogspot story like Sean LaFreinere above on Blogspot.

There's more chance of the CCP supporting multi-party elections tomorrow than of me reading Blogspot anytime soon.

Simon, you keep banging on about Pundita mate but we can't read it cos it's blocked. Couldn't you at least paste some it onto simonworld? I would l-o-v-e to read it really.

Paul:  If you can't find a proxy, have you tried pulling things out of the Google cache?  Or is that blocked too?

Freedomist - Lefty ,,, Fredomist .. leftist.

Those still seem like anti particles, Course Norm Geras thinks he can have leftism without the bloodbath and the misery .. if thats also what that guy thinks, he is wrong too .. leftism itself is the imposition of deadly force against those who are no threat to anyone. its a program of forced cohersion, not to protect but to impose and collect.

Socialism seperates acts from cost, so civilisation falls into roman hedonism untill all must be a slave, too many become too behaviorally incompetent to be allowed freedom ,, they take the guns away,, the punks and the thugs then run amok,,, you end up enslaved with all the punks and thugs.

Leftism and freedom is incompatable .. and in any example that ever existed or exists now, the two have never co-existed in stable equlibrium.

As the people of Europe, esp Britain, are finding out.

Well, unless you mean the freedom that comes out of Orwells book of NewsSpeak.

Joes Link

bq. Pundita suspects that the way democracy has been presented by advanced Western democracies helped create the perception in the developing world that one has to reach a certain IQ and level of character development before democracy can breed anything more than anarchy.

American Republican democracy is superior because some things the mob cant ask for ...

Im quite the fan of pointing out the adaptability, reaction, feedback, which are some of the inherent coping mechanisms of a freedom culture.

It is indeed a key strength, (that has confounded the lefts attempts to destroy us) that isnt focused on very much.. self evidently so ... perhaps taken too much for granted with us that live in it. that the outsiders would have no common experience with.

Course, my principle of freedon isnt based on a better economics or better adaptation to change.

To me its a moral issue, still more desirable even if it didnt offer the best adaptability and robust economics. Freedom has value in its own right, having intristic worth apart from its benificial side effects.

Perhaps you can look at this angle, The arab socialist societies have coped with the seperation of resposibility from its costs,, by attacking, beating, beheading those that stray outside of strict behavior ...

Might I say.. thats the less desirable way to constrain behavior,,

Not providing a socialist prop to iresponsibility is a far kinder method than the boot club and sword.

And a lot more fun too, since we can all grant ourselves the license our own wallet will support.

Leftist freedomist ... Freedomist Leftist. they seem like bright people too .. and yet there is this void in their calculus .. examples of the failure im talking about in abundance ... they seem blind to the simple notion of cause and effect ... shame.

The crucial point is Brad Sesters's - China is about to hit a wall in export-driven growth. It must shift the focus of economic growth from the export market to the domestic market to continue present growth rates.

But domestic demand increases on such a scale requires, and entails, vast domestic change that would threaten the Communist Party's power. Mr. Sester doesn't mention that. Mark Steyn alludes to it.

What is not described in the thread is all the purely economic problems, notably related to finance, whose consequences have been avoided to date due to rapid growth. When growth rates slow down to what might be sustainable levels, say 3% annually, those issues will start wrecking the place unless dealt with properly.

But dealing properly with those will IMO also threaten the Communist Party's power.

Mark Steyn had an excellent piece on China a week or so ago.

Paul - most people use proxies to read blocked sites. Try anonymous for one. If that doesn't work, send me an email and when I'im back on tuesday I'll post excerpts of pundita's stuff. Otherwise I recommend you get in touch with other China bloggers and ask them which proxies they use. There are many and they aren't hard to use.