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Fair enough

However, this success in bringing people out of abject poverty is not simply down to the government, he says.

“Chinese people, by working extremely hard, lifted themselves out of poverty – in part because some of the stupidest economic policies ever created, by Chairman Mao, were abandoned in favour of versions of capitalism.”

8 thoughts on “Fair enough”

  1. Yeah. Well done China for eliminating extreme poverty with 40 years of repealing Marxist lunacy and reducing the number of people murdered by the state from a few million to a few thousand. Imagine how quickly they’d have done it if they’d repealed all the commie rubbish.

  2. Just because a stupid or malign government can make people poor it does not mean that government can make people rich. People make people rich.

  3. . . . it does not mean that government can make people rich.

    I believe there are at least three professors telling us that we’re only rich because government creates the money.

  4. What always fascinates me is the close resemblance of China’s present system to Nazi Germany. Co-opting the capitalists evidently works better than killing them.

    Of course they were lucky to get rid of their version of Hitler without a global war.

  5. My wife is Chinese and I have relatives (by marriage – duh) in Beijing. I would agree with the hardworking point. The amount of sheer graft that almost all Chinese at all levels consider normal is just not to be contemplated in a welfare society. If the Chinese consider all westerners to be a bunch of lazy fucks then they are, relatively speaking, quite correct.

  6. @Boganboy that really is the thing, isn’t it? The socialist economies that seem to work best are the national, rather than international, ones. Not sure how much we should value an economic system where you need to be Nazis to make it work.

  7. Boganboy
    March 1, 2021 at 11:57 am
    What always fascinates me is the close resemblance of China’s present system to Nazi Germany. Co-opting the capitalists evidently works better than killing them.

    That is because Fascism is an evolution of Socialism. Mussolini who invented Fascism started out as an ardent Socialist. Hitler too was an avowed Socialist, but he liked some aspects of Fascism, the triumvirate of Government + business + unions. Instead of means of production – business and labour – being owned by the State, it is left under private ownership under the direction of the State to serve the interests of the State.

    This avoids bloody revolution because the businessmen and aristocracy will share power and keep some profit, rather than ending up robbed and toiling in the fields, or dead, under Socialism. Workers too will keep some of what they produce to make themselves better off.

    In fact not so different from the way it has evolved in allegedly free, democratic Countries.

  8. Dear Mr Worstall

    I recall Dr Pirie at The Other Place writing on this subject: a group of Chinese villagers agreed to keep most of what they grew and as a result grew more than they had in the previous 5 years combined. Naturally their neighbours dobbed them in to the ‘authorities’, but, since this was after Mao, instead of the men being slaughtered and the women and children being more enslaved than they already were, the Paramount Leader of the day thought it a Good Idea and copied it across all China. And the rest is History.

    Something like that.

    https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-document-that-changed-the-world

    DP

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