l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 What liberals want to copy is the authoritarianism.
In 2008, I wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism.” That title came from H.
G. Wells, one of the most important socialist writers in the English
language. He believed, as did his fellow Fabian socialists, that Western
democratic capitalism had outlived its usefulness.
What was needed was a new, bold, forward-thinking system run by experts with
access to the most modern techniques. For Wells, the label for such a
system mattered less than the imperative that we implement a revolution-from
-above. He admired how the Germans, Italians, and Russians were getting
things done. In 1932, he proposed calling his revolutionary movement “
enlightened Nazism” or “liberal fascism.”
Wells was hardly alone. Such arguments were being made in all the Western
democracies, under a thousand different banners. Most progressives rejected
terms like “fascist” or “Communist,” but they still touted foreign
tyrannies as superior to the outmoded democratic capitalism of the 19th
century.
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, was a great fan of both Italian
fascism and Soviet Communism. He returned from a trip to Russia to proclaim
, “I have seen the future, and it works!”
Some things never change.
Andy Stern announced recently that he’s been to the future, and it works.
In this case, the future resides in China, which he says has a superior
economic system. “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist,
shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being
thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”
Who’s Andy Stern? He’s just the guy who, until last year, ran the Service
Employees International Union, which under his leadership spent more than
any organization to get Obama elected in 2008, some $28 million.
Comparatively, Stern’s influence in the Democratic party eclipses that of,
say, the allegedly sinister Koch brothers or anti-tax activist Grover
Norquist among Republicans. Stern himself visited the White House more than
any other person during Obama’s first year in office (53 times).
Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its
way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of
profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich
. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own
people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning,
it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The
planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets
created.
Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like
geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed
rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain
stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.
Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run
by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn
’t seem to care.
More intriguingly, SEIU is a huge supporter of the Occupy Wall Street
movement, which, taken at its word, is most concerned with income inequality
and the back-room corruption that comes from “crony capitalism.” And
Stern touts China as the model for how to fix things? China has 115
billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or
less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political
system.
Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To
the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because
China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy
within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for
nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you
can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The
Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three
choices: move, jail, death.
Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian
capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the
authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual
whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing
about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious
of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as
something to emulate.
If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better
than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy
is the authoritarianism. H. G. Wells had a phrase for that.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a
visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can reach him by e
-mail at J**********[email protected], or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 Tribune
Media Services, Inc.
------
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary."
--- Ernesto "Che" Guevara
看某些人的帖子有感，五千年的奴性文化的熏陶，真不是盖的。
管你在美国呆一辈子，也还一样。 |
|
