How the EU’s powerhouse was dragged down largely by poor government and over-regulation:
Ronald Reagan
I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help
That’s probably the single most important quote in disabling the American economy. Meanwhile the Chinese, with a very central government, is cleaning our clock in every strategic sector over the past 20 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/opinion/us-china-musk-swift-tariffs-manufacturing.html
I just spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai, meeting with Chinese officials, economists and entrepreneurs, and let me get right to the point: While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of *everything.*
If no one has told Donald Trump, then I will: His nickname on Chinese social media today is “[Chuan Jianguo” — meaning “Trump the (Chinese) Nation Builder”]— because of how his relentless China bashing and tariffs during his first term as president lit a fire under Beijing to double down on its efforts to gain global supremacy in electric cars, robots and rare materials, and to become as independent of America’s markets and tools as possible.
“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/opinion/us-china-musk-swift-tariffs-manufacturing.html
We left the steel industry and cars and airplanes to the CEOs and they wrecked the place. We had our Sputnik moment and funded NASA and got a high tech head start that provided jobs for 50 years. We left energy to “drill baby drill” politicians and China walked away with solar panels and windmills, and as a by product flat screens and the entire consumer electronics industry.
Please wake up. Your CEO buddies aren’t doing you any favors. They’re out for their own rich payday and then they’re off to their 20,000 sq ft mansions while you lie a smoking ruin in the gutter.
Do better. Really. Please.
We all heard the narrative “big gummit picking winners and losers”. We were assured the correct thing to do was shovel all the money to the “JCs” and let them decide what to do with it.
And that is what the “JCs” decided to do, while enriching themselves.
Steve
Merry Christmas. LOL this is what the next 4 years are going to be.
I’m never quite sure of the Chinese economic model. I’m not too trusting of the data that we are fed by them.
Here in Europe the various governments and the EU are trying to micromanage everything. They even had a ‘bendy banana’ laws:
Welp, the “I’m from Big Business, and I’m going to take care of you.” approach hasn’t exactly panned out.
Trickle down economics has been proven again and again to not deliver on its sham promises.
And let’s not forget Grover Norquist, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Careful what you wish for.
The main problem with governments is the fiat currency system. This gives them too much control of the economy. The gold standard worked very well in the UK after The Napoleonic War, right up to WW1. It was a sort of automatic self-balancing mechanism that governments could not interfere with too much. No inflation, economic growth, balanced budgets and minimal government interference:
The 19th century marked the golden age of the gold standard. The 1821 formal adoption by the United Kingdom set a precedent, leading to widespread global adoption. This period was characterized by an international embrace of gold, spurred by the 1870s’ Latin Monetary Union and the 1890s’ Scandinavian Monetary Union, creating a de facto international gold standard. This era of globalization was marked by relative economic stability, increased international trade, and the free flow of capital, underpinned by the solid trust in gold-backed currencies.
I’m not too sure if we can go back to a gold standard or what would happen if we did
Not only that but I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help has never been uttered by anyone ever. So, it’s merely a lame strawman that sets up a bankrupt ideology. Like the Gulf of Tonkin “attack.” However, it’s opposite "The Government should be helping me! is uttered always and everywhere by every business operator having a bad day.
But Snopes says otherwise
Mike
Typically glib response. I figure it was intended that way. it is genetically wrong in its spirit and intent. Ya see here on this thread are discussing a sentiment expressed by a former president. Not what somebody else said years/decades later and not at all expressing the same sentiment pejorative See every adult knows this: When somebody goes out of their way to, in effect, change the subject by pettifogging with an attempt at litteralism they know they’ve lost it. All thoughts, feelings, arguments to the contrary are bogus. And they thought we wouldn’t notice.
The principle would apply to, for instance, the Coasties, when they arrive to pull someone out of the drink after their boat exploded/burned/sank. Police/Fire responding to a 911 call. “Big gummit EMS” responding to a 911 call. Army/Navy helos bringing supplies to people cut off by a storm/flood. National Guard troops in a deuce and a half, evacuating people from their flooded houses.
Who does TFG say he will use to round up illegals and close the border? National Guard and Federal troops.
Yet, everything the government does, in every instance, is evil?
Steve
That’s certainly a wonderful example, assuming your ambition is to be an Amazon delivery driver making $19 an hour. (Oh, wait! $22 announced by Amazon just a few hours ago.) That will lift those guys *(who make less than half of what unionized UPS and FedEx drivers make) out of poverty, for sure.
We should all have such lofty ambitions.
Does this mean you’re a fan of an economy run by the likes of the CCP?
DB2
Better than an economy that repeatedly flatlines under TIG.
I left school and had jobs like that. I studied at night and went to one of the UK’s top universities before entering a profession and running my own business for 35 years.
Off course, i could have done nothing and expected the government to do everything for me, like so many do now.
So, do you think the other 45 million in England at the time should have done the same thing?
How successful do you think you would have been then?
We would have become one hell of a country - a European Singapore.
