Politics

What is the Goal of the West, compared to China’s?

I recently watched the documentary series China: Time of Xi, which gives an insight into the rapid progress of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Sure, it is not the most critical account there could be — you could even say it has “state propaganda” written all over it — but it is fascinating nonetheless. Whatever you may think of China, it would be ludicrous to deny that this country has progressed by leaps and bounds. Let’s talk about this progress and how it compares to the West.

We can start with technological progress. To give you a few examples: Twenty years ago, Western countries built up the mobile telecommunications infrastructure in China. This was a German-Finnish project, with Siemens and Nokia being at the helm. In the present time, however, China’s Huawei was the first to roll out 6G networking. At a recent recruiting event by Huawei I was invited to attend, a company representative told the audience that Huawei has a lead of one to two years over its competition. Again, you may doubt these numbers, but you cannot plausibly make the point that Huawei is not in the lead. What happened to Siemens and Nokia in the area of telecommunications? They are no longer relevant. You can continue. Do the United States, England, France, or Australia have bullet trains that are a very compelling alternative to domestic air travel? No, they don’t. I vividly remember, when I was a wee little boy, that the German Green party extensively campaigned against technological progress. High-speed trains were very, very bad. No convincing argument was given, but that mattered as little back then as it matters in Western politics nowadays.

Technological development that only benefits part of society is a double-edged sword as, obviously, part of society is effectively cut off of progress. Yet, unlike the West, China makes a serious attempt to lift people out of poverty, and they are succeeding. In contrast, the last time I checked, the West has set up an elaborate system to not only consolidate but to grow the underclass by means of welfare and institutions that foster learned helplessness. All advanced Western societies have a permanent underclass where people have been living off the taxpayer for multiple generations. This is absolutely scandalous but, for whatever reason, it is not seen as a big problem compared to, for instance, man-made global warming. In the West, there is an infatuation with big, uncertain projects nobody really knows anything about, most certainly not the average politician with their bullshit university degrees if they even have a degree, as opposed to solving concrete problems right here, right now. In “China: Time of Xi”, concrete examples are shown of how people are lifted out of poverty, for instance by providing free schooling and housing to children. I almost shed a tear when I heard a teenage girl in that documentary say, “I want to work hard and become someone useful.” Meanwhile, we have been raising a generation of slackers in the West that shuns hard work, be it physical or intellectual. They probably view it as a violation of their “human rights” to have to work for a living.

Ask yourself, is your life in the West getting better or is it not? I live in a fairly big Western city. My habit is to stay in on Saturday and Sunday. When I reemerge on Monday morning, it is rare for me not to notice examples of weekend vandalism. On some Mondays, I count half a dozen or more trashed bus or tram stops on a single route. Why do our youth not spend their time productively and crack open their books as opposed to trashing public property? You may now fall prey to the broken-window fallacy and think that all that damage does not have any negative effect and, in fact, provides work for local tradesmen who fix the damage. Sure, if you enjoy sloppy reasoning, this sound like a perfectly fine argument. Yet, it ignores that each dollar can only be spent once. In the end, the taxpayer is footing the bill and the probably many billions of Euros that are spent in the West due to fixing the damage vandalism has caused can’t be spent on something else. This hits home, in particular, if you get a salary bump in December and realize, on your January pay slip, that a tax increase has already eaten up a chunk of that extra money. It really gives you that extra push to overdeliver on your projects at work.

I think you would have to be very optimistic to say that the West is stagnating. Quite frankly, if you don’t realize that the West is in a downward spiral, you need to get your head checked as we are at a level where debt is at record highs, assets are in a bubble, and IQ as well as life expectancy is trending downwards. Yet, instead of fixing our countries, our politicians prefer to fight imaginary dragons. Is your life today better than it was a few years ago, on a whole range of metrics? On some metrics, my life has improved, due my own effort, but I don’t think society as a whole has improved. I can’t even name a single metric within the sphere of activity of government in which I noticed an improvement. Safety, or the ever-increasing lack thereof, is a good example. Assume you want to buy a car. In my city, as well as in many other Western cities, car burnings are so common that you simply don’t want to bother getting a car. I’d love to buy myself car, but I don’t because the risk that it would get keyed, trashed, or set ablaze is just too high. (Thankfully, public transport is decent enough where I live, so it is easy for me to trick myself into believing that this restriction of my personal liberty is a positive.) If you think I’m paranoid, you need to do more research as we are long past the point where you only hear about car burnings in the news. Instead, it either happened to you, or a friend, or you’ve seen it happen. It’s a pandemic. I don’t see increased police presence, surveillance, or draconic punishments to caught perpetrators happening, so cars keep on burning. This affects my life as well as the wider economy. Yet, it’s somehow not a problem at all. It’s probably too mundane a task to keep our streets safe.

Now contrast this to how things go in China. Every single year things get better and better. Yes, even pollution in big cities has become less of an issue. The Chinese are on a huge upward trajectory. In terms of PPP-adjusted GDP, they are already the richest nation on the planet. On a personal level, it’s probably the case that there is no demographic as rich as the Chinese middle class because the relative purchasing power of their money is so high. To illustrate this, consider that a STEM-degree holder makes a comparable (nominal) amount of money in Beijing, China, and Berlin, Germany. Yet, the latter is saddled with a bizarrely high tax rate and higher local prices. He lives like a pauper while his Chinese counterpart lives like a king due to the very high real purchasing power of his money.

It is the goal of the Chinese government to lift its people out of poverty and create wealth for all. They are succeeding left, right, and center. In contrast, the idea of running a country to the benefit of its people is seemingly a grave insult to Western leaders. They much rather fight a few more stupid wars to funnel trillions of taxpayer money into the military-industrial complex, ignore the rural parts of their country, and don’t care about failing infrastructure and widespread societal decay. Yet, for all this bullshit you are paying more taxes year after year, while getting less and less in return. If countries were businesses, which country’s business plan would you back: the Western one or the Chinese one? I fully understand that it is painful to admit to yourself that your country has been failing you. Yet, that is exactly what has been happening. You’ve taken the “red pill” in other parts of your life, now take the political one as well!


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25 thoughts on “What is the Goal of the West, compared to China’s?

  1. A great many aspects of this continuous Western decline have been thorougly explained by the libertarian “Austrian” economist & philosopher HANS HERRMAN HOPPE, whose works I have been studying continuously on the side during the past 15 years or so.

    I would particularly recommend his groundbreaking opus magnum “Democracy – the god that failed” (“Demokratie. Der Gott, der keiner ist”), in which he provides a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches its conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy (democracy doesn’t signify an advance or even “societal progress” with respect to monarchy), but outlines deficiencies in both. “Republican democracy” an the democratic way with all trend towards moral bankruptcy, its ills and its far reaching consequences, Hoppe says, was a model imposed by the U.S. after World War I (cf. his scathing German lecture “Die amerikanische Ideologie” on YT). Since then, nothing has really changed. Who would dare to put into question a model which rules almost all over the world?
    A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences whereas a stock of capital gets built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time preference all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association. By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the hyper-invasive and domineering mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author then demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property.
    Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author’s previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. I think the book is a phenomenal eye-opener and higly applicable to everyday phenomena all around us. Most certainly it’s book for people who derive pleasure from intensely questioning the world.l as we’ve been taught to know it…

    1. Thanks for those elaborations. I have read a bit of Hoppe’s work. He is an important thinker in the libertarian tradition. I will have a look at the book you recommended as my familiarity with his work extends mainly to his comments on capitalism.

    2. Democracy has no moral ground. There has never been a 100% consensus to bow to a system where a 50%+ majority can dictate the rules.
      Also, I can’t remember having signed a social contract.
      Case closed.

      1. The most fascinating aspect of it is, that “dimokratia” used to be a swear word or a curse in ancient Greece and the ancient Roman world. It was never ever considered a role model for any larger and particularly well organized society. E.g. the Roman republic was never a democracy but an aristocracy organized as a republic. The U.S. were conceptualized as a republic according to the Roman model, never as a “democracy”.
        With al of this in mind it’s rather strangely fascinating how this cult of “democracy” got propagated during the course of the 20th century and until today. “Democracy” appears to be an irrational secular religion, very much like the cult about sex in today’s pop culture.

      2. Of course the gist of it all is, that in our time “democracy” is nothing but a fancy code word for collectivism and organized theft.

      3. On another site I frequent a user claimed that in Russia, it is common to describe democracy as the “rule of the democrats.” I don’t know if this is true or not, but it is certainly fitting as “democracy” seems to be little more than a gravy train for a bunch of corrupt and, by and large, useless politicians who could not care less about the wellbeing of their constituents.

    1. The author is a joke.
      “Chris has founded and built several multi-million dollar businesses”
      –> My reaction: “Shut up, dude.” Wtf is a “multi-million dollar business” anyway? Turnover? Income? Profit?
      “including overseeing the deployment of over $30m into Venture Capital opportunities ”
      –> My reaction: braahahahaaaa thirty lousy million you managed to raise for a VC? That’s peanuts. Plus you just “oversaw the deployment”? Like you tracked the funds, while some dude made the wire transfer?

      Gimme a break…”advising family offices internationally”… my ass. We have a couple of family offices with AuM of 1-5billion USD as clients, I can assure you they wouldn’t even go for a coffee with this punk.

      But yeah, nice charts. Now do I go long or short?

  2. “I can’t even name a single metric within the sphere of activity of government in which I noticed an improvement”

    That’s not a problem of the West, but a “government” problem.

  3. “If countries were businesses”

    T. Gebel makes this point where he cites that (can’t remember the exact figures) 90% of governments are losing money each year and 60-70% of people are dissatisfied with governmental services. Given these numbers, any even slightly talented entrepreneur can do better.
    I say it’s going to be over anyway soon. The cat is out of the sack. Digital hard money exists and the big fat fiat money scheme’s days are over soon.

      1. Gebel is pretty active at the moment. I’m in frequent exchange with his personal assistant, as I translate a few articles and subtitles on a voluntary basis for them. I understand that the Atlas Initiative by Markus Krall also collaborates with them. Seems they want to pull off a project in Europe, as well. This of course would be phenomenal. Best case scenario is the EU collapsing and Germany becoming the hub of entrepreneurship again, heavily supported by a multitude of free private cities, which essentially provide the “software” for innovation. I would love to see this. Such development would actually make me consider moving back to Germany.

        On a side note, Krall and Gebel are both “sponsors” of the klimafragen project.
        https://www.klimafragen.org/

      2. Thanks for tipping me off on the “Klimafragen” website, good to see, I didn’t know about that!

    1. I have worked on these trains. You don’t wanna sit in this thing, brother. You can’t see shit because you’re constantly in sort of a trench, so all you see is that. No landscape, no cities, no nothing. Boring as fuck. Plus, it’s not that fast. They don’t have that many LGVs (ligne grande vitesse). So it’s like riding a formula1 car in downtown.

  4. I have a question to ask. I have seen some of your comments portraying positively countries such as Russia and China. If you like them that much, why don’t you move there? Instead, you wish to go to places like Switzerland, also a developed country.

    1. I speak neither Russian nor Chinese. I don’t know about Russian, but as a Westerner, you won’t be able to acquire Chinese citizenship. The Chinese government also makes it incredibly difficult to get permanent residence. In a comment under a different post I mentioned the country I want to move to (Singapore).

  5. “Do the United States, England, France, or Australia have bullet trains that are a very compelling alternative to domestic air travel? No, they don’t. I vividly remember, when I was a wee little boy, that the German Green party extensively campaigned against technological progress. High-speed trains were very, very bad. No convincing argument was given, but that mattered as little back then as it matters in Western politics nowadays.”

    This article is interesting:

    https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/26/17903146/mass-transit-public-transit-rail-subway-bus-car

    I am also puzzling about the fact that the US hasn’t developed public transportation in all minor cities like China. But I think there is no need to because Americans love cars. It may also creates more jobs for construction workers and construction company. You can flight if you want to. Driving a car through long distance seems to be an enjoyment for many.

    I really love and miss Shanghai metro system. It is newer, much more convenient and is very extensive. It is also very cheap. NYC system is rather old and the road that it travels from one destination to another is not the most straightforward path. But then if you drive then it is much faster than going by metro. I really admire the fact that China had planned the metro system since 1960s, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.

    But I vaguely remember this, a colossal accident of 2 subways hitting in Shanghai, killing almost everyone in them. I am not sure what is the probability of encountering accidents like that in metro compared to airplanes or traffic accidents while driving a car.

    1. There are some hints that the US State Department was involved in the founding of the German Green party. Assuming this is true, the hostility towards technological progress of the Greens makes a lot more sense as it’s simply an example of sabotage. This connection is not as outlandish as it may sound. In particular in Germany this has a long tradition. For instance, the GDR actively funded leftist/anarchist groups including the RAF. The German Green party likewise started out as an extremist splinter group, which had the aim of destroying society. One of their original goals was the legalization of pedophilia. The promotion of homosexuality is still a big topic for them. Everything’s a good goal for them as long as it undermines the nuclear family.

      1. While I am trying to familiarize myself with the American political culture. I printed the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bills of Right to familiarize myself with the outline of the US constitution.

        If I want to learn more about German political structure, which source should I go first. My understanding of German current politics is very limited. Lots of stuffs you guys say is flying above my head.

        From what you wrote, it seems to me that Western Europe (Gosh you usually use the term “the West” so much that it confuses me, since I don’t know which part of the world you are talking about, like the US, or the western european countries, or Germany in particular.) has been injected by several types of socialist venoms during the Cold War, and now what we are seeing is the manifestation of these venoms. Am I correct?

        I thought Germany

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