Not only did Rush incorrectly read the Exhortation, his counter example, of iPhone manufactured in China driven by American consumers’ demand, is cheesy.
It would be good to see Chinese demand fueling Chinese industry. It would be good to see American demand fueling American industry. Instead we have a rather frivolous American demand (what they had no phones before iPhone?) fueling employment in China. Now some Chinese make a product not invented in China and not particularly needed (for its cost) in China; some Americans are out of work because the American demand is sourced to China. This is not free market: this is a convolution possible because some governments and some international bankers made this Ponzi scheme possible. If it were just about x iPhone owners and y Chinese electronic factory workers, we could merely say, —whatever. This would be an irrelevance, a fluke in the flow of normal commerce. But this is a system whereby Ohio sits on welfare, the Bay Area is filled with six figure salary earners, often from a foreign country, sharing closet-size condos, driven into childlessness, and the rest of Central California on welfare, and China now having our industrial base. For Rush to promote this ship of fools as functioning capitalism is plain idiocy.
I never ceased to be amazed at how words with commonly understood definitions manage to get twisted to someone’s view point.
this jesuit made very clear his dislike of market systems and his desire for government to intervene
I don’t think he actually read the exhortation. When he supposedly quotes from it he’s reading someone else’s critique of it. Maybe he didn’t do his homework. Shocker.