China's nanotech revolution ("rivaling even the capacities of the United States")

AsianResearch.org ^ | Alexandr Nemets

[Gunslingr3]

False. I believe that when a foreign nation uses prohibitive manipulations against our nation's manufactures, it is appropriate for us to fight fire with fire.

Using the government to prohibit trade isn't extending commercial relations, it's restricting them. You think because the Chinese government hobbles the choices of their consumers that the U.S. should emulate them. You do not address the effect of government restricting U.S. consumer choices on the standard of living of those consumers at all.

I still believe in trade and commerce.

You believe in government managed trade. Your adulation of Hamilton (and government managing trade) exposes you as a statist. You assume that the Chinese communists have a superior grasp of production and resource allocation, and further assume that their decision to provide consumers with subsidized goods is a harm to those consumers.

I would be prohibiting (i.e., countering) their advantage obtained from their manipulations.

What you would counter is the advantage conferred upon American consumers with an advantage conferred to whatever businesses feted Capitol Hill from K street..

You clearly haven't studied Alexander Hamilton, or your disdain would have long ago vanished. He was a true Revolutionary War hero.

He was a 'revolutionary' who wanted to replace the British King with an American one. He was a monarchist at heart, and mercantilist in thought. He lobbied for a central bank and encouraged the American government's indebtedness. I know plenty about him to not care for him. I prefer Henry and Jefferson to the Hamiltonians.

And the guilt trip about usurpation you try to lay on him is really not one that would have been anticipated in 1796. The Communist Party and its covert tentacles dedicated to the very usurpations you allude to (from the Bill of Rights, etc) was not yet in being...or even conceivable then.

The usurpations were certainly conceived of, the Federalist Papers exist as an effort to refute those concerns. The fact remains if the Hamiltonian quest for a stronger federal government resulted in the usurpations he dismissed. The Jeffersonians were correct.

[Paul Ross]

Because they've been trying to create relatively stable reserves for their banking system. Buying a Buick doesn't improve the balance sheet of a bank trying to have reserves for lending.

If that were so, then they would abolish their communist system. They don't and won't. And if they were serious about "relatively stable reserves" then they wouldn't park them in the U.S. currency...which they know their parasitic trade flows has seriously weakened. Nor would they also, if so financially constrained, be able to be simultaneously deploying 800 IRBMs across the Strait of Taiwan this last decade. Nor deploying the new Yuan class attack sub. Or the DF-31 ICBM, or the JL-2 SLBM.

Their banking system is a horrendous mess though, another reason I'm not worried about the U.S. falling prey to the dragon.

Their banking system is a front operation for the Party. Of course its a mess. They funnel the country's net profits through the banks to shore up their municipal and state industries. They periodically kick in $120 billion or so to keep the edifice going. Looks like they are going to do the same thing with their "stock market" as well. But it means nothing, because they will have the lion's share of the world's industries located in their grasp when the balloon goes up.

[Paul Ross]

[Hamilton] was a 'revolutionary' who wanted to replace the British King with an American one. He was a monarchist at heart, and mercantilist in thought. He lobbied for a central bank and encouraged the American government's indebtedness. I know plenty about him to not care for him. I prefer Henry and Jefferson to the Hamiltonians.

The charges against him being a monarchist was a base canard often leveled by his enemies in the court room, and in politics. I don't think you know him quite as well as you assume. Perhaps later I will explore that further.

But I was intrigued by your fastening upon two of the other Founders, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. And indeed they are worthy of our respect, but you should note that Jefferson was one of the intemperates who disparaged wrongly Hamilton. Nonetheless, you should be aware that Jefferson was not the blind free trader you assume either:

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

--Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119

"The prohibiting duties we lay on all articles of foreign manufacture which prudence requires us to establish at home, with the patriotic determination of every good citizen to use no foreign article which can be made within ourselves without regard to difference of price, secures us against a relapse into foreign dependency."

--Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, 1815.

[Paul Ross]

{Hamilton was]... a mercantilist in thought.

Before you disparage Hamilton's mercantilism...you better take a gander at this modern sample of the best and brightest of economists on the Chinese side of the fence:

"Kicking Away the Ladder", by Ha-Joon Chang, Cambridge University.

He basically would appear to conclude that Hamilton is right for someone seeking to become an advanced and dominant nation.

Clearly they are climbing the ladder now that we kindly...and selflessly... put in place all for their benefit...manifestly against our own national interest...and once at the top...you can see the wheels spinning in their communist heads.

They plan to push us off the throne, so to speak, and somehow kick the ladder away themselves so that WE can't climb back up to where we used to be.

I.e., no mercy or foolishness to let us recover once our utopionists realize that they have been been mugged, and lose a bit of their liberal dementia.