Keeping Up With the Party Line at The New York Times/Pravda
From the movie review “Casualties of China’s Transformed Economy” by Jeannette Catsoulis, in today’s Times:
Bracketed by stunning long shots taken from the front of a moving freight train, Wang Bing’s epic, three-part documentary, “Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks,” is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy.
How foolish of China to abandon its “thriving socialist economy” of perpetual mass starvation for a rapidly progressing market economy of soaring skyscrapers and rising living standards for hundreds of millions.
From the book review by William Grimes “Looking Back in Anger at the Gilded Age’s Excesses” in today’s Times:
Again and again, surveying the post-Civil War landscape, Mr. Beatty throws up his hands in despair. “The people supported the government, and the government supported the corporations and the rentiers with the people’s money,” he writes. “And the people did not seem to object, at least not enough of them.”
Maybe that’s because of wheeler-dealers like Jay Gould, who once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” They just don’t make them like that anymore.
Or maybe it’s because the reviewer and author (Jack Beatty, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly) are 180 degrees wrong. Instead of the “robber barons” stealing the industries that did not exist before they created them, and impoverishing those who had next to nothing in the first place, the vast new wealth that the great industrialists employed as capital served radically and progressively to increase the supply of goods available to the common man to buy and increased the demand for the labor that he sold. That’s the actual nature and significance of the fact that, in the reviewer’s words, “The richest 1 percent owned 26 percent of the wealth, and the richest 10 percent owned 72 percent.” The hated rich created that new and additional wealth and were led by the nature of the profit motive, capital, and free markets to employ it for the progressive benefit of the masses.
Such is the intellectual and moral state of The New York Times, a veritable cesspool of wrong and vicious ideas serving day in and day out to poison the minds of its readers against the capitalist economic system and economic freedom.
This article is copyright © 2007, by George Reisman. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print, other than as part of a book and provided that mention of the author’s web site www.capitalism.net is included. (Email notification is requested.) All other rights reserved. George Reisman is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics.
Comments (14)
Bill
The same people who say China is worse of now complain that the US is worse off because it has a trade deficit with China? This is damned if you do and damned if you don't.
The real reason that the NYT and others glorify the totalitarian countries is that they have never actually lived in a totalitarian country.
Published: April 18, 2007 5:16 PM
RMcE
As someone wittier than I once wrote: "I like to read the Bible and the New York Times every day so I can keep up with both sides."
Published: April 18, 2007 6:04 PM
happylee
I wonder if Virginia Tech gunman Cho was an avid reader of the Times. This quote from a yahoo post today suggests the answer is yes.
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The material is "hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing very angry, profanity-laced," he said on the MSNBC Web site. Among the materials are digital video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera about his hatred of the wealthy, Capus said.
Published: April 18, 2007 6:11 PM
Brent
To repeat what's been said (posted) before...
I can not think of anything civil to be said (about the nytimes).
I would only add that it is also probably not an intelligent use of time to logically analyze the garbage printed by that paper.
Published: April 18, 2007 7:35 PM
Mark Humphrey
I enjoy reading handwringing comments of disallusioned socialists, who wail and moan about the Great Capitalist Awakening in Asia.
To true socialist believers, China and India would have been better off had they never awakened from their long slumber. Far better for peasants to have remained in the countryside--where they belong--leading quaint and contended lives, than to pour en masse into the cities seeking their own betterment, while building improvements for those who follow. Far better for the Chinese to sleepwalk through a thousand years of hopeless stagnant socialism, then to awaken to the possibilities of individual self-improvement and prosperity.
What I enjoy about Red Tears is their awareness that the Capitalist Awakening in Asia may well be too far advanced to turn back.
Published: April 18, 2007 7:42 PM
David C
I have a difficult time accepting China. The political freedom rankings suck, the economic freedom rankings suck, and there are no effective restraints on government at all. To me that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen rather than a great awakening.
Have the powers that be in China decided to throw the poor masses a bone in order to remain strategically compettitive with the US? If so, I hope it is not lost that another way to become strategically competitive with the US is knock us down a peg or two. Considering the economic fundamentals in the US economy, our industrial base moving to China, and China's trillion dollar reserves .... IMHO we are a sitting duck, they are not interested in freedom. The fact that they increased their economic liberties a lot during the dot.com boom, but not much at all over the last 6 years while the US has been weak is an omnious sign of their intent.
Published: April 19, 2007 12:31 AM
TLWP Sam
Isn't that a case of tough luck David C? In the business world if a new business is leaner and meaner then the old ones, then the old businesses have to adapt and improve or go the way of the Dodo? Then again China's successes may not be long term and it may fizzle and the U.S.A can rest easy.
Published: April 19, 2007 1:12 AM
Jonathan
David C,
China isn't a disaster waiting to happen. Its a disaster reversing.
Published: April 19, 2007 3:01 AM
Jonathan
The conclusion is priceless.
"Capturing moments both large and small — a blast-furnace “mishap,” a plaintive song on the radio asking “Baby, aren’t you tired of this yet?” — this profoundly empathetic and humanist work bears witness to a vanished way of life and the real cost of progress. “Get this place on film now, because it won’t be around much longer,” advises one of Mr. Wang’s stoic factory workers. Luckily for us, he did."
The regrettable cost of progress is the disappearance of slums.
Published: April 19, 2007 3:04 AM
Peter
I don't understand why people keep saying things like "they are not interested in freedom" about China. No government is interested in freedom. Never have been, never will be - nothing special about China here. Freedom happens in spite of what the government is interested in. The freight train is rolling; the Chinese govt can only stand in the way so long before they become a dim red spot on the track.
Published: April 19, 2007 3:10 AM
P.M.Lawrence
But these things don't in themselves stop anybody starving. Unless and until they flow through to increased food production and/or imports, it's just moving food from mouth to mouth, so that different people starve - it just becomes less noticeable from "survivor bias". In the end, with a fully freed up economy, that will right itself - but right now it hasn't, and for so long as the rest of the Chinese economy stays controlled to stop (say) imports of food and/or agriculural technology, it will stay that way. It's at the very least premature to celebrate these developments. They are only immiserating the people who are off the radar, in the traditional Chinese manner.
Published: April 19, 2007 5:25 AM
Matt
The problem with China is that they know how to put on a show, and Western capitalists are happy to watch. In fact, the country is still very socialistic with price controls and strict regulation, and it's unclear if they will ever become truly capitalist except in a few pockets. Although they have recently passed property rights, the poor are basically landless and have no control, and much of the environmental degredation has come about for this reason. The leftists are idiots, complaining about the wealth gap, when in fact the wealth gap is caused by China's own statist policies which gave some capitalism to the eastern coastal cities, but not to the interior.
If you paint China as capitalist, the left will successfully use it as a millstone to sink free market arguments. China is reforming, but a path of fascism is more likely than anything at the moment.
Published: April 19, 2007 7:47 AM
Roosvelt
Fascist ? Just like the United State of Bush, eh ?
Published: April 19, 2007 10:28 PM
David C
Peter Said: I don't understand why people keep saying things like "they are not interested in freedom" about China. No government is interested in freedom. Never have been, never will be
But that's the point. In the US I can point to 100 million gun owners, hundreds of years of property rights expectations, hundreds of years worth of free elections, hundreds of years worth of free markets, and hundreds of years of free speech traditions. All of these create incredible social, military, and political pressure that restrain the government even though they try their damdest to choke off our freedoms.
Where are these forces in China! Concepts like property rights, free speech, right-to-bear arms - where are they in China's culture! Nowhere to my knowledge! Show me the force that's restraining the power of government over there and I'll believe it. Where is that force? who is it? what is going on!
I want to believe you, but everything I see points to a strategic decision due to external pressures and not fundamental change due to internal ones. If the US is that external force - the world and China are in deep trouble, becuase we are technically bankrupt and very vulnerable!
Published: April 19, 2007 11:20 PM