The Truth Monopolists Dispatch

What goes around, comes around.....eventually

"What I Saw at Tiananmen" was the title of a June 4 Wall Street Journal Opinion piece by Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Towards the conclusion, Ms. Rosett touched on the themes and ideas behind The Mighty Quinn.

"Freedom, in the framework of a real democracy, allows individuals to weigh their own talents, skills and ambitions, choose their own trade-offs, and chart their own dreams. That gives rise to innovation, exuberance and prosperity of a kind that no government can plan or centrally command into existence."

The failure of central command points to an acceptance of a pessimism of the intellect, and the optimism of the will is seen in the innovation and exuberance which begins Ms. Rosetts' second sentence.

"Purposefulness and a freedom from purpose " is suggested in the "weighing" and "choosing" of the first sentence. The inevitable human failure of any central command is, in "a freedom from purpose", seen as a benefit.

The value of freedom as against a too-controlling government which informs Ms. Rosetts' vision can be glimpsed in Greil Marcus' notion of an invisible republic.

The gentle reader will also find a resemblance to the Ronald Reagan quote that serves as a sort of epigraph to this website, with which it shares a skepticism of whatever authority a government can claim and a respect for what a free people can do.

"Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put here for a reason and has something to offer."

There is a huge irony confronting China these days -- post-Tiananmen, the government basically decided to "buy off" the restive segments with unprecedented economic growth, at 10 percent a year, driven almost completely by exports.  This export-driven growth created a credit bubble that burst and led to a collapse of Chinese exports of over 40 percent, almost overnight, exports that may never come back. So now China has two unpalatable options: increase domestic demand, which requires a broad loosening of central control, as described in the quote above; or diminish (ummmm...crush?) the economic expectations of the Chinese population, a sure recipe for domestic turmoil.  It is, in macroeconomic and social planning terms, a classic case of being between a rock and a hard place

 

This dispatch was written with the assistance of Brian Prioleau