Shooting Inconvenient People

The professional left in America and their chattering-class useful idiots have followed a consistent pattern for a century: sympathizing with tyranny in their musings over how to implement policies fueled by jealousy and an undying fear of economic liberty. (Ross Kaminsky – Stern Idiocy)

Never met a dictator he did not like

Add Andy Stern, former SEIU Kommisar, to the list of Communist China admirers

Inside of every good progressive is a very illiberal goose-stepper longing for the strongman. Planning committees and central control send a thrill up the legs of those who disdain the individual liberties enshrined in our moribund constitution. Bold action! Intervention!

Stern waxed poetic about China’s bold central planning:

China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development. (Andy Stern – I Love Communism)

That’s nothing. Tom Friedman’s ardor swells and his breast heaves as he gushes forth his paeans to the burly, bossy, ever so muscular Chinese Communist Politburo. If only the power elites here in America could snatch such willy-nilly decision-making from the ignorant clutches of workaday rubes! Why can’t we do away with all this messy democracy and have a dictator state like China, ask the ChiCom fanboys.

Jonah Goldberg knows how to puncture the balloon:

China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty.

Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.

Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death. (Goldberg – China Envy)

Here’s the reality that the progressive toadies don’t want to face…

Now comes the hangover. The public works projects are winding down, unleashing a wave of unemployment and an uptick in social unrest. The banks' nonperforming loans are rising, and local governments are insolvent. The country is littered with luxurious county government offices, ghost cities of empty apartment blocks, unsafe high-speed rail lines and crumbling highways to nowhere. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

This last statement could also describe the US just as well…

A financial sector that allocates credit based on politics rather than price signals led China into this mess. Popular pressure to dismantle crony capitalism is building, and the Communist Party would be wise to get in front of it while it can. (WSJ – China’s Hard Landing)

For an entertaining and excellent and critique of Stern and Friedman’s corporatist mindset, see Matt Welch’s The Simpletons.