Mincing Through the Tulips

I was dozing through This Week, when Robert Reich the token liberal, described China as "authoritarian capitalism". I stopped the doze to listen. It sound an awful lot like Yes Sir, I Understand and Will Comply from a month ago.

While it is gratifying to hear Reich dip a toe in the water of my argument (mixing of metaphors, but hey, it's my blog), the mincing of words is disturbing. "Communist" China is fascist, pure and simple. Fascism, invented in both word and deed by Mussolini, is government in league with capital for the comfort of capital. Reich went on to question that free market capitalism must necessarily be better at production than fascism, although he chose not to call the spade a spade.

Fascism never works in the long run, simply because it concentrates too much wealth in the hands of too few (and does that sound vaguely au courant?) to be self-sustaining. As I have written often during this endeavor, the BRIC are just the latest entities (our plantation South qualifies) to export poverty, in their case to the US and Europe. Such an effort is motivated by money illusion, and fails when the exporters wake up and realize that currency is not what matters in trade; what matters is goods (services never really matter in trade, despite what bankers will tell you). The Chinese hold US dollars, but what they really need are consumers and raw materials; the latter they are taking out of Afghanistan, for instance, on the lives and expenditures of America. We are such saps.