I hope you're right, but personally I don't buy the argument that just because some people see the practical/economical value of freedom, that it will inevitably flourish. Instead, I believe that moral arguments trump practical ones, and so without someone championing individualism and egoism, any economic freedom may be fleeting. And I don't (yet) see any public figures making those types of moral arguments in China or elsewhere.

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Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 9/28/2005 12:31:58 PM

As it becomes more prosperous, China will either stagnate or progress. I don't see the new merchant class allowing that stagnation to happen. Even a dictatorship can be ousted, as happened in Eastern Europe and the old USSR.

It may take 20-30 years, but China will pull out of it's status quo.

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Posted by Anonymous to Thrutch at 9/28/2005 08:24:48 AM

Thanks Gideon.

>That country still has a long way to go.<

There are a lot of cross-currents at work in China, and the outcome could go either way, i.e. either move towards a freer society or lapse back into the full-fledged totalitarian state it was during the '60's through '80's.

I'm far from an expert, but my guess is that the lack of any real individualism within chinese culture coupled with the fact that the West continues to teach everyone the wrong lessons, will ultimately weigh in favor of totalitarianism.

I hope I'm wrong...

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Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 9/25/2005 04:40:16 PM

I think sometimes with all the production coming out of China, people get the impression that it's now a more or less free country. It isn't. It's still very much a dictatorship, if a little less totalitarian than it was under Mao.

Take a look at this example. The New York Times reported Friday on China Lectured by Taiwan Ally and mentions that "Li Ao, a defiant and outspoken politician and author who says that Taiwan should unify with Communist China...chided China's leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration's fear of academic debate and advised students how to fight for freedom against official repression." All this during an address at Beijing University.

How was this reported in China you might ask? Well, not surprisingly, it wasn't. Take a look at this story on the speeches from the China Daily. Here's the only content from the speech that the story mentions:
In the speech, he claimed that China had never been as prosperous as it is today.

He said that the Communist Party of China is "the only party" that can take China on to global success.

In a similar vein, Li, in his speech at Peking University, said that young students should not only care about themselves and he encouraged them to build the confidence to shoulder responsibility for their motherland.

That country still has a long way to go.

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Posted by Gideon to Thrutch at 9/25/2005 12:08:24 PM

I definitely second your call for renaming the Mises Institute, and while we're at it, let's see if we can get Kelley to rename his "Center"...

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Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 9/23/2005 12:08:19 PM

Concerning the current intellectual atmosphere at the Mises Institute, I truly do think that it is a tragic situation, for what is happening there is nothing short of intellectual fraud.

Mises was an advocate of constitutional, republican government -- and he explicitly rejected anarchism in all its forms as the false and naive doctrine that it is. He certainly would have never lent his name to the advancement of "anarcho-capitalism," anymore than he would have lent to the advancement of anarchistic communism.

Nonetheless, these Rothbardian frauds do not shy away from this fact; yet all it takes to see the nature of their deed is to imagine the existence of a Karl Marx Institute that promotes the idea of limited government!

But of course, the engineers of this intellectual abomination have found a more subtle way to perform their deed: and this is, hiding behind the authority and true economic ideas of a great man to promote their own false political ideas -- which otherwise no one would have spent two seconds to entertain.

As I said somewhere else, these people should cultivate some honesty and go ahead with the erection of a Murray Rothbard Institute, where their ideas would rightfully belong.

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Posted by Resident Egoist to Thrutch at 9/23/2005 11:33:32 AM

Thanks Sidney,

I saw the headline come across the wire about 15 minutes after I made the post, but I didn't know enough details to tell if it was a bad suit. (I figured the odds were that it was bad, but conceivably there could have been some merit to it.) Your link indeed shows that they haven't learned anything.

It's also scary that Attorney General's are becoming so active in looking for anyone to sue, simply to make a name for themselves.

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Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 9/16/2005 06:44:13 AM

Looks like the government there haven't actually learnt anything yet.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood plans to sue insurance companies to force them to pay for flood damage to homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a source familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/mississippi_flood.reut/index.htm

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Posted by Sidney Cammeresi to Thrutch at 9/15/2005 05:24:41 PM

I had assumed they were two distinct people, but I think you are right (see author link at capmag: http://capmag.com/author.asp?name=42 ).

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Posted by Amit Ghate to Thrutch at 9/02/2005 04:05:59 PM

Did John Lewis change his name to J. David Lewis?

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Posted by Anonymous to Thrutch at 9/02/2005 01:36:19 PM

Well, one does find the occasional Marxist sympathizer who moved from the U.S. or Europe to the USSR but they are rare and tend to become quite realistic after a few years there.

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Posted by Gideon to Thrutch at 9/02/2005 01:04:34 PM

Your parenthetical comment near the end is choice.

Thanks for what, to me, has amounted to a very good book recommendation.

Gus

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Posted by Gus Van Horn to Thrutch at 9/02/2005 08:44:45 AM