China Scrambles Jets as US and Japan Enter Air Zone

AP via Telegraph ^ | Friday, November 29, 2013

[deks]

Map from BBC article - credited sources are Chinese Defence Ministry and EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration). . .

BBC article

[1010RD]

I am arguing in favor of bringing back American jobs.

But, you don't state how. I'm looking for areas of agreement here. If you're talking about lowering the regulatory gauntlet and returning America to the pre-Jones & Laughlin Steel, pre-Darby, and pre-Wickard era of Commerce Clause jurisprudence, then I'm with you.

If you're talking about corporatism and crony capitalism via trade restrictions, I'm not.

How we do that is certainly up to everyone, but we have sold out American businesses.

You give me a little hope here, but "up to everyone" sounds like majority rule, not individual liberty. We got where we are by observing majority rule. I like liberty, individual liberty and as much of it as we can get.

In the meanwhile we have racked up $17 TRILLION DEBT, and growing. Debt. Debt. American debt.

I'll lump these statements all together for ease. You're right. Our debt is ours and came to us via majority rule and, in part, by allowing the government to expand on the Commerce Clause, making it an instrument of tyranny. This problem is uniquely American and is a spending, not a free trade problem.

We need to make things right here.

What things? Why things?

Bring back American jobs. Now.

Again this vague platitude carries no meaning. Define: American jobs, "now" and how you will do this. Jingoism isn't thoughtful.

[1010RD]

Your caveat, nb, undermines his remedies, which remedy(ies) he doesn’t name.

You correctly cite government as the problem. CNN cites government and more of it as the solution.

[1010RD]

You do realize that a “trade deficit” is an invention and doesn’t ever exist, ever.

[GeronL]

an earlier story said South Korea also sent planes in

[GeronL]

It is not in our national interest to tax and regulate and sue companies out of the country. Also “free trade” with countries like China is just stupid.

[GeronL]

replace food stamps with WW2-type ration cards

or even

abolish the whole welfare bureaucracy and just give them cash for showing up with their dependants in tow each month.

lol

either way would save tens of billions

[Cringing Negativism Network]

I think it is time for the government, in the following way:

I support an across-the-board 10% tariff.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the government should pick and choose. Far from it.

I am saying EVERYTHING brought into America to sell, is assessed a 10% tariff.

I mean everything. Oil. (just imported, no tariff on American oil)

Food. (just imported, no tariff on American food)

And everything manufactured. Everything.

10%.

That is not a lot, but I believe that getting all products lumped into “produced in America” vs. imported, points out an ever more important difference.

America needs to produce/grow/drill out of the ground right here in America, what we use.

Not import it.

For an entire generation we have been selling off America.

Bring it back. Now.

[Zhang Fei]

You do realize that a “trade deficit” is an invention and doesn’t ever exist, ever.

There's an element of cargo cultism involved here. Some of the industries being talked about were cutting edge at the time they were based stateside. Shoes. Textiles. Commodity flat-rolled steel. The idea here is that if we merely start making some of these low-tech products stateside again, Arthur Winkler will dust off his leather jacket, and Ron Cunningham and his celluloid high school buddies will leap out from behind TV screens and resurrect the 50's era, when the dollar was king, and the world's factories, outside of the US, were in ruins. If only that were true.

In reality, countries prosper, or not, based on the quality of their human resources and the scope and scale of their natural resources (timber, cultivable land, rainfall, mineral deposits, etc) and technological innovation. We've hit the jackpot on both. From the submarine to the A-bomb, Americans have pioneered and continue to pioneer leading edge technologies. Without these technologies, we'd be Australia, a prosperous First World country, a land of milk and honey. But it's these technologies that make the US a force to be reckoned with on the world scene. Not sunset industries like shoes, textiles and commodity flat-rolled steel. There are natural resource-rich countries with sky-high trade tariffs. Two of these countries are Argentina and Brazil.

[Lexinom]

From a national sovereignty standpoint I agree with you.

Practically, we have Chinese assembling electronics for pennies on the dollar compared to what an American worker would need to make as a sustainable wage.

We have moms Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart whose only concern is buying the next gadget for their kids, gadgets that might last 1-2 years before being tossed into the landfills. Country of origin is the furthest thing from their thoughts.

We could argue "Patriotism!" but are inevitably met with the stark reality that the America of today commands neither the respect nor passion of the America settled by Puritans and later fought and bled over by true patriots centuries ago.

Compound all of the foregoing with the fact that peoples' mean application of logic lacks the rigor it once did, owing in large part to obessive preoccupation with the very gadgets in question.

[Sequoyah101]

Sir, I appreciate your usually sensible and thought out responses. Reading this one and considering the whole of what I am seeing it feels like a foregone conclusion that perilous times are not only eminent but are here. There is no need for conjecture of a tipping point between have and have not nor an out of control government for whom those who still work slave for. Case in point, my property taxes have gone up 25% to 30% in one year alone as even local governments grab for all they can get. In one jurisdiction taxes NEVER went up for years and years and now they go up regularly these last few.

I made the mistake of going to town this morning. I knew it was a mistake before I left but actual need of something forced it. What I saw pains me. Tens of thousands out buying Chinese junk that they don’t need and should not be able to afford. People who produce little added value buying trash from people who work but also produce little of value for ever higher profits for the few who have taken risk of moving their business to somewhere else.

Endless droves of people who live off of the labor of others fool enough to continue to work are also clearly here and now. The balance is not tipping, it has tipped.

The game is lost and the clock is being played out.

[Mr. Jeeves]

And China is hardly a Soviet-style monolith. It's a wild and wooly capitalist new frontier that today's Mandarins (formerly known as Communists) are barely holding on to with their fingernails. This saber-rattling is for domestic consumption, an attempt by the ruling class to appeal to nationalist impulses and yell "Look at meeeee! I'm still important!" For there is so much money sloshing around China right now that even the nine old men with a huge military and security state apparatus at their fingertips can't control much of what is happening, aside from publicly picking on unpopular groups like Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, and human rights activists. We aren't too many years away from the day that the Chinese moneyed class tells the Old Guard to shut the hell up - we are running things, now.

China's biggest economic problem is that its products are getting quite expensive. Not USA expensive, yet, but they are losing market share in some product categories to poorer countries like Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and soon Myanmar. Consider the changes in Japan between 1950 and 1989 - China is most of the way through that same evolution.

[1010RD]

What if the state you lived in imposed that same requirement, that everything you used had to be made locally? Would you be better off?

Let me suggest you listen to these two podcasts:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/11/joel_mokyr_on_g.html

and

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/11/edmund_phelps_o.html

They both make good, logical arguments. I lean toward Joel Mokyr’s interpretation, although micro-innovations are occurring all the time. We just don’t notice them.

Remember that nobody in 1900 thought you could eliminate 90% of farm labor and still make food. After you’ve listened to them, ping me and tell me what you think.

[1010RD]

Couldn’t agree more and Argentina was the US of South America. They failed because they lacked the institutions and culture to support a dynamic market system. Their Catholicism with its inherent socialism and preference for the heavy hand of government handicapped them and has ruined their economy - still is ruining it.

Take a look at Chile. Why are they succeeding?

[1010RD]

The Chinese economy would die a quick death if they went to war against America and her allies over these islands/economic zone. They’d lose a war, plus lose Korea, Japan, Vietnam and the entire area as trading partners.

The history of SE Asia isn’t one of trust in China as a fair dealer. They fear a Chinese hegemony. China’s on the cusp of becoming an also-ran. You’ve got the equivalent of Cook County (Obama Country) trying to maintain control on a population that wants to be Hong Kong. They’re going to lose, but it can be smooth or bloody.

[GeronL]

bump

The leftists who destroy economies with their policies never accept responsibility. They always want to blame “speculators”, “greed”, America or even joos.... for what they did themselves.

Argentina and Venezuela are following a similar path that so many others followed before them, such as Cuba and Zimbabwe

[nathanbedford]

It's a good thing you did not look back as you drove out of that town, you might have been turned into a pillar of salt. Last year we trampled one to death and this year one is been shot over a television. It sure sounds like the last days.

If it is lost it was lost in the trenches, that is in the classrooms, the pews, the jury boxes, and on those TV and computer boxes that shapes the American culture because culture trumps politics and it is clear that culture is breaking down. With it will go the rule law as the devil takes the hindmost.

All of this in the wake of "Thanksgiving." A culture that has abandoned giving thanks for materialism and, ultimately, cynicism is in deep and desperate trouble.

[Patriotism Populism Tradition]

If the Soviets or Nazi Germany could have produced low-end products for us at bargain basement prices, at the small cost of our consumer manufacturing base, should we have taken the deal?

China has had the great good fortune to come up against a United States run by morons who are paid to believe in China’s pacific intentions. To me, there’s no greater evidence of the foreign policy weakness of the Obama administration than that the PRC no longer cares if its mask
slips. Sure, they want “reunification” with (conquest of) Taiwan. Sure, they want to assert bogus claims that allow them control over resource-rich areas contested by Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines. Sure, they can’t achieve these things without an American sellout of our democratic partners in Asia. But what are we going to do about it?

Probably nothing. After all, we need their garbage. Better hope the PRC turns into the big cuddly Switzerland of the East sometime pretty soon. Except that ‘pretty soon’ has been coming for at least 25 years now, or so politicians on both sides of the aisle tell me, and all I see is a China growing stronger and more aggressive. If contrary to all expectations it doesn’t happen, and China makes a move for Asian hegemony instead, I guess you could say they screwed up.

But at least we got some cheap TVs.

[butterdezillion]

Absolutely right. Not a worry in the world, that we’re playing with nuclear fire. Especially now that Iran is nuclear and every Islamist nation in the world could have bought nukes from AQ Khan...

/s

[familyop]

It’s a consequence of trade imbalances, resulting balance of payments deficits. The result of those problems? The gigantic pile of U.S. debt and China surpluses spent on the military buildup (especially the massive Chinese nuke buildup going on for more than a decade). Americans aren’t fooled by domestic enemies, their monstrous capabilities for sponsoring media propaganda, their big influence as political constituents in all parties, their anti-defense pushes from both political parties, their desires for more centralized worldwide government, etc.