Managing China's Economy

On this day:
988
Norse King Glun Iarainn recognises Máel Sechnaill II, High King of Ireland, and agrees to pay taxes and accept Brehon Law; the event is considered to be the founding of the city of Dublin. The Horse King!
1212
The most severe of several early fires of London burns most of the city to the ground.
1460
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, defeats the king’s Lancastrian forces and takes King Henry VI prisoner in the Battle of Northampton.
1499
Portuguese explorer Nicolau Coelho returns to Lisbon after discovering the sea route to India as a companion of Vasco da Gama.
1553
Lady Jane Grey takes the throne of England.
1778
American Revolution: Louis XVI of France declares war on the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1882
War of the Pacific: Chile suffers its last military defeat in the Battle of La Concepción when a garrison of 77 men is annihilated by a 1,300-strong Peruvian force, many of them armed with spears.
1925
Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called “Monkey Trial” begins with John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.
1946
Hungarian hyperinflation sets a record with inflation of 348.46 percent per day, or prices doubling every eleven hours.
1962
Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite, is launched into orbit

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened Brazil with a tariff of 50% if Brazil doesn't stop legal action over charges against its right-wing former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Earlier this year, he threatened 25% tariffs on Colombian exports that would grow to 50% if the country didn’t accept deportees from the US. (Colombia ultimately accepted the deportees and avoided those tariffs.) Trump also imposed tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China over the role he alleges they play in facilitating illegal migration to the US and enabling fentanyl to reach the country.
Interference with the internal workings of another country should drive Americans nuts.

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Mamdani's college application is revealing of him, but the reaction to his scores is revealing of the Left. Arrogance is at the Left's marrow; their critics are, by definition, unimaginative, unread, and just dumb. To have their standard bearer in the lower half of the class is mortifying to them.

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Brennan, accused by Trump of weaponizing the FBI, accused Trump of weaponizing the FBI to go after him.

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Have polls become de facto substitute voting?

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Managing China's Economy

The more economic power the [Chinese] Communist Party takes, the more knowledge and outside initiative is lost. The difference between the popular image of China and what research actually shows about it could hardly be greater. Our politicians and media paint horrifying images of China’s brilliant strategic planning, but in the vast literature on China’s economy, there is hardly a single study that even attempts to argue that a specific industrial policy has created real commercial success.

The Westerners who now assume we need an active industrial policy in order to compete with China thus choose not to imitate the Chinese policy that created the country’s successes, but the post-2010 policy that involves enormous risk-taking. To the extent that the new policy has achieved any results, they are negative. Capital has been transferred to less productive state-owned companies. Despite the fact that they only account for around a quarter of the country’s GDP, they get about 80 per cent of the banks’ lending. Growth per capita, which in the 1990s and 2000s was around an incredible 10 per cent annually, declined to 5 per cent before the pandemic (and some observers believe this was an exaggeration). Under the current economic model, China finds it hard to squeeze any growth out of the economy.--Norberg

While the West has a decided philosophical advantage, it suffers, as it did in its competition with Japan, from organizational jealousy, a fear that its messy, unchecked spontaneity will wilt before the fierce, structured, state-directed economies that oppose it. Some of this is simple restlessness, some the by-product of the very experimenting process that has given it such success. But the real impetus is that foolish selfishness that asks simple-minded politicians to achieve their grasping dreams. No sensible, nonpathological explanation is available to clarify the apparent success of Mamdani in a sophisticated, wealthy city like New York.