Very balanced and sane view on finance and populist industrialism. Need to encourage new cohort of patriotic silicon valley hardware startups (ie. palmer et al.), especially wrt to underwriting venture financing from govt, like the chinese has done for solar and EV. Musk can and should be courted to be brought around with supervision of these programs
Yeah i think adressen is doing gods work but its not nearly enough compared to the top down policy that is coming out of china. One datapoint: chinese regulators wont even allow douyin (tiktok china) to IPO; this is strong of a signal that china is sending to discourage “degen software” investments
Clownish sure, stunted man child, sometimes, but establishment, definitely not (Biden: “the justice department should investigate this guy”). And probably the person with the most experience in frontier industrial manufacturing, not least of which is from experience with the giga factory in Shanghai
Musk is smart, no doubt, but I believe his whole Doge stunt was a maneuver to hide in plain sight. "You see, I wasn't the problem. I tried to fix the place. I tried to make it work." As we move into an era where billionaires will be blamed for every social ill and where Luigis will pop up like dandelions, he'll have a manufactured alibi with Doge. Every one of his business lines is heavily subsidized. He's as enmeshed in the system as any defense contractor.
Not sure if it was an intended consequence, but its really due to DOGE that we confirmed that America operates more like a revolutionary empire bent on spreading its ideals to every person on the planet than the USSR could've ever dreamed of being
China does consider industry a jobs program - that’s precisely why they subsidize employment so heavily and are content to accumulate dollars in exchange for goods. In their mind, better to have an extra 5% of the population going to the factory to churn out widgets rather than collecting disability checks. The US, of course, has made the opposite decision.
That China-US mirror is perhaps the single key point your analysis misses: the US trade deficit (and its attendant joblessness) is the result, yes of overregulation, but also quite heavily of an overvalued currency. And it’s overvalued b/c China, the world’s surplus country, has a closed capital account. The US cannot forcibly open their capital account, the only solution is to make imports more expensive.
Countries running ~8% current account deficits as the US is now - at full employment, in peacetime! - are headed for a disastrous collapse, probably sooner rather than later. And because trade balances globally not bilaterally, we cannot simply target China - their surplus would find its way through intermediaries.
Tariffs are a clumsy, but effective stopgap solution.
This is true. China is engineering trade surpluses via capital controls and investment policies, and certainly views employment as a key goal of their economic policy, and they have been very explicit about this. Chinese want jerbs and the politicians prioritize it.
In addition to massively innovative manufacturing, China is also the home of massively inefficient state owned firms that exist as jobs projects as much as they do for revenue.
Chinese overcapacity is not pursued for mere employment. They’re seeding the ground for the future dominance of Chinese firms, Chinese goods and Chinese businesses.
That’s true, it’s a multifaceted issue. But it’s not a coincidence that loan growth to the industrial sector went parabolic just as the property boom was coming to a close - middle elements of the party said to themselves “oh sht, if we don’t juice manufacturing, all these construction workers are going to be jobless” so they told the state-backed banks to pump out loans and the banks did. And the result is enormous overcapacity.
Some of that may be ‘long term plan to dominate the world’, but a great deal too is ‘yikes! we’re in a tight spot maybe kicking the can down the road, making this the next guy’s problem, isn’t so bad’.
I will just echo Moonrat’s point. There are ways in which if you bring back basic commodity production, you’re training up the local know-how to engage in more ambitious manufacturing projects. A lot of innovation in manufacturing is the learn-by-doing incremental process efficiencies that you never get to master if you’re not engaged in production.
One last tidbit to spark your imagination. There are carryovers in applications between low level industry and high level ones based on pure functionality. The type of Filler equipment used in beverage production (all brands owned by Coke and Pepsi etc) are analogously applied in battery production. There is crossover in base level logic as well. For flat products like Nestea (alas… Fuze) we fill the can with Nitrogen to fill out the can: the exact same logic applies to batteries when you’re filling them.
So, our domestic North American capacity to make batteries is bolstered by existing tech from beverage production.
Reinstating basic commodity production as an "industry as a training program" is not necessary unless your existing working population is borderline incapable of ever producing truly ambitious projects anyway, and largely irrelevant to the re-invigoration of Americas industry. Smart young people do not need training on production systems for basic goods that can be produced to acceptable quality by an Indian teenager in a ramshackle factory anymore than an aspiring fine dining cook needs to work at Taco Bell. The learn-by-doing is possible in real time on advanced projects, provided that the working force is intelligent and under good leadership.
Some make a big deal of manufacturing knowledge becoming "lost" in the US but it is mostly what was once a job filled by smart and competent young men became a workforce thats a revolving door of bumbling morons and invalids, thus those that fulfill the more advanced and detailed oriented tasks in the production are simply the only competent people on the floor of the operation, and now quite old and set to retire. The knowledge that these old outgoing workers possess is not some kind of magic wisdom, its just intelligence and competency applied to understanding a process. The reasons for Americas industrial decay are largely as BAP states: a "moral-social-political framework that holds back the eminent in favor of the exigencies of brownification." which leads to a poor quality lower-middle and middle class that is incapable of being an advanced industrial labor force.
The issues I see with development (or re-development) of a manufacturing infrastructure for basic commodities include a hostile regulatory environment and lack of labor force. There are major structural changes that need to be made and planned out before this can be implemented at a national level.
Smarter people than me will need to figure out how to convince people that climate change shouldn’t be the driving force behind every ridiculous environmental policy and that spending 15% -40% of a project’s total cost on faking reports to show no or “mitigated environmental impacts” is a colossal waste of resources. But as of now you simply can’t pencil out the costs of new manufacturing infrastructure in most cases.
We see stupid arguments almost daily whether or not kids should go to college or go into a trade and need back surgery by age 40. Ideally, the whole university system should be scrapped but I understand that is a pipe dream, as is the suggestion that private companies will foot the bill for on the job training. But, as college degrees become increasingly worthless due to DEI and other discriminatory policies against white men perhaps this is an angle that can eventually be revisited.
You’re one of the few to note that China, while clearly good at applied math/science and engineering (perhaps especially reverse engineering), is weak at true innovation and produces little true genius. South Korea is much the same story. Effective and pragmatic reindustrualization in the West will likely have long term benefits in real progress beyond what would be achieved if industry stays anchored elsewhere.
This is a great post, but my comment would be to avoid projecting European attributes onto China. Yes, China is already the world's dominant industrial power, but unlike European powers it does not use its dominance to conquer the world or impose influence except in very narrow and provincial terms for its near abroad.
The fact is that the Chinese are a myopic people obsessed with money and making money. They have no vision or idealism to conquer lands and impose their will. Their desire is simply to make ever more money.
That makes China in many ways a non-threatening actor for the West -- all the west needs to do is to refuse trade. Yes living standards will fall somewhat in the near term, but the west can always create space for itself while it sorts its own problems out, and there is really nothing China can do about it.
While this is all true, we must not scoff at efforts to recapture upstream production. Subsidising the production of basic commodities can build the foundation for more ambitious advanced manufacturing projects.
I've been living and working in China for more than 15 years now, I've learnt a lot about Chinese history, ancient and modern, and the industrial history is a big part of that. I've been able to walk through it and see it with my own eyes, it's literally written into the landscape all around me as I type this.
I've also met and talked to many party members, professionally and social, and of all the dumb ideas I see coming out of America about China (no shortage of those) the idea that the Chinese people, high or low are motivated by some desire "to avenge the century of humiliation" has got to be one of the dumbest.
AVOID something similar from happening again, certainly, but AVENGE? That's absurd.
The CCP are crypto-neo-Confucianists and technocrats, they don't think like that, they don't work like that and they don't plan like that.
Coal and ore isn't being mined, factories aren't running, buildings aren't being built and a hundred other projects aren't underway to put Chinese gunboats up the Potomac and the Thames like the Americans and British did up the Yangtse.
The generally like BAP, I think he's an important thinker but his main failing is his weird feeling that the driving powers behind human society are psycho-sexual neuroses. Here we see mention of both repressed homosexuality and humiliation fetishism.
They can be the motivation for some individuals, maybe even certain social cliques, but they don't run the geo-politics of Empire, they never have, and they're not running the Grand Plan of Beijing today
There are a couple of things discouraging local production and innovation; one of them actually is the way finance capitalism presently works. The Chinese have a system of regional banks who help finance industry. So do the Germans with their landesbanks and hidden champion firms. Nothing like that exists in the US, but it did back when we were still making things. Banks in the US are these giant conglomerates that don't fund local industry or much of anything else. A band-aid from 2008 that was never ripped off (they should be broken up into local banks, and starting a new bank should be easier).
Worrying about HFT is retarded, and almost entirely from scumbag CDO dorks and inside traders being mad their brother in law in that business made bonus in 2009 and they had to look for a job for blowing up the world economy. Worrying about airlines and manufacturers being leveraged to the nostrils, or private equity looting productive companies and everything else seems like a bigger issue.
I think tariffs are fine. At worst it works like a VAT, which everyone else already has. When I buy crap from Japan (to Europe) I have to give some asswipe 23% of its value. I don't see anything wrong with Americans having to do this also. The absence of these taxes was arguably a problem for a few decades, and free trade zones did exactly what Perot said they would, aka "giant sucking sound."
Your article is missing a very large chunk of the economic history of Argentina.
In the first place, there were two Argentine regimes led by Juan Peron. You seem to be talking about the first one--the one that followed the 1943 coup by the GOU military lodge. of which Peron was a member, which eventually enabled his ascent to the Presidency in 1946. This is the reign that everyone remembers--Evita, and all that. Although Andrew Lloyd Weber musical would arguably have held much more entertainment value--or anyway prurient interest--if it had been followed by a sequel featuring the widower, the Conductor himself, into the Nelly Rivas years. That's how Juan eventually got the boot in late 1955, of course: after Evita's death, Juan took up with 14-year old Nelly Rivas as his mistress and common-law wife. Just a little too scandalous for the international community to handle, in particular the Vatican. It didn't help that Peron had responded to the outcry over his personal conduct by introducing measures to legalize divorce, grant legitimacy to children born out of wedlock, and legalize prostitution. The Pope excommunicated him. Which put the Argentine government in an uproar, forcing him to step down. (To cut a long and salacious story short. More details here. https://consortiumnews.com/1999/111299a.html )
The first Peron regime was famously populist, of course. Peron--a personalist leader not wedded to any particular ideology or economic theory, and initially influenced by the wife, Evita, and her championing of the Argentine common folk--made an alliance with the working classes, the decamisados, raising the minimum wage and making deals with the Argentine labor unions. That's why Peronism was elevated to legendary status as a "political philosophy": Peron's tenure in office led to tangible gains for the ordinary working people of Argentina. You couldn't call it socialism, or even autarky; Peron was trying to cut deals with David Rockefeller at the time he was forced out of office. Peron became a legend because when he was President, there was actually some give-back to the Argentine working poor. That's really all it takes to get a wave of popular appeal--run a government that makes sure that regular job-doing people get paid more than crumbs. So rare a thing in Latin America that he was revered by millions long after he stepped down in late 1955.
The second regime, in the early 1970s, that was different. Peron was barely there. He was in even worse shape than Joe Biden was in 2023. But he was brought back to power--his far-right allies even managed to get his excommunication reversed!* and lasted only around a year before dying in office in 1974. Whereupon his widow, Isabel took office...(to cut a long and salacious story short, once again. More details here. https://consortiumnews.com/1999/111299a.html )
(*up until very recently, the Argentine constitution required a candidate to be Roman Catholic in order to be eligible for the Presidency.)
The important part about Peron's second term is that the Argentine national debt at the time of his passing was only around $1 billion. And following the shambles of the Isabel Peron/Jose Lopez Rega government--which only lasted another two years--in March 1976, a military junta took over. And that's when the economy really went to hell. By the time the junta made its excuses and stepped down following the Falklands War fiasco in 1983, there had been so much private capital flight and plain old bust-out looting by the junta that Argentina hasn't gotten its head above water since.
(*it's very difficult to find a timeline graph on the Internet that goes back farther than 1992)
the accompanying story:
"...The military in control of the state took some of those petrodollar loans too: about 10 billions were used to buy weapons to finance state repression and insane war projects with Chile and the UK.
It wasn’t much compared to the private debt that all the big financial players had gotten into, though. But the state ended up paying for that too, by nationalizing it in 1982. It didn’t matter that much of the private debt wasn’t even real debt, but money that had been “loaned” from the headquarters of multinational corporations to their local Argentine branches, not to produce anything but to speculate on any of the wide variety of schemes explained above, and send the easy profits back as “repayments”. The state also didn’t get into too much trouble finding out how much debt was real and which one had already been paid back. If they are going to pay it all, I might as well claim I owe every cent I borrowed in history, especially if I’m going to be the one in charge of the audit, reasoned the bailed-out banks and companies.
By 1983, when the 8 years of military rule were over, public debt was 465% bigger than the year of the coup, and there wasn’t much to show for it in terms of improvements for ordinary Argentineans. Financial institutions and corrupt military officers had stolen most of it, and flown it out of the country, while Argentina was already lagging behind its scheduled payments since the Latin American debt bubble exploded in 1982.
By the time Raúl Alfonsín was elected into office, debt was unmanageable, with short-term due dates every other day, in the midst of a barely governable country, where the criminals that had been tormenting it for the last decade were in control of the military, police and trade-unions, in association with the parasitic businessmen who made their fortune during the dictatorship and now had amazing leverage over the economy..." https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/ignacio-portes-paul-singer-v-argentina-debt-come.html
check out the timeline at the beginning of the article below
That's the factor that's been ignored by practically every other news article on Argentine economic woes in the US national media: the enormous incompetence of the Isabel Peron (&Jose Lopez Rega) regime, 6/1974-3/1976, and the role played by the corrupt Argentina military junta that followed, 1976-1983.
Everyone's scratching their head over what the problem is with Argentina for the last 40 years, like it's all about ideology...could it be Peronism? Populism? Socialism? Teh Minoriteez?
Argentina was drowned in debt by those bandits in the Neofascist Junta years. That's what happened.
Everything since the fall of the military regime has clearly been the fault of leftist peronists. It is possible with reasonable policies for a country to recover from even great setbacks.
Could you mention any specific people and show evidence that they "working class whites should be eating out of dumpsters or going without basic necessities"?
For real. What the left calls “capitalism,” is simply how Jews behave. All those “libertarians” like Rothbard, Mises, etc were Jews.
Some things that most people don’t know about the Third Reich:
Was originally called National Socialist German Workers Party
Brought in interest free loans which was a boon to ordinary people
Had a program called “winter relief” which was basically mandatory for all non poor Germans to donate to, to help poor people especially mothers in the winter time.
While corporations were still privately held, they had to serve the German people or their business could be ended.
Hitler’s “racism,” was complicated and he went to see the Grand Muffti of Palestine to coordinate against the Jews. So he certainly was not so bigoted that he didn’t see Muslims as potential allies.
Volkswagon was people’s car for ordinary folks.
First 40 hour work week and mandatory vacations for worker at minimum in Europe and maybe in the world.
Few in real life can or do practice libertarian economics. I greatly admire Musk … and others… but the most important real life libertarian in our lifetime was Alan Greenspan.
It’s a scam.
If your view of America however is the besieged Ivy League and the Internet… and apparently occasionally interacting with dusky hued domestics without so much as an associates degree… you also might be alarmed at the approach of The Barbarians.
Waiting For The Barbarians would be an excellent title for this post and half the comments.
There's way too many shortsighted people in positions of power today. It's insane how nobody can see the obvious long-term consequences of their shortsighted decisions.
There will certainly be an opening in the future for a new Elite to emerge to replace the old order. As the Chinese say a new mandate of heaven will emerge. Just like a barbarian tribe from the steppe.
Also, Japanese physics and mathematics is excellent, and has been for a long time.
Japan is an example of a highly creative population that does have "vision" and has birthed such innovative mathematicians as Shigefumi Mori, Ito, Nakayama, Kobayashi, from the early 20th Century until the present. Japan is very different from China, which does have a serious dearth of mathematicians, their most impactful one being born in HK and educated in the US (S.T. Yau).
We shouldn't confused Japan and China, they are very different.
Very balanced and sane view on finance and populist industrialism. Need to encourage new cohort of patriotic silicon valley hardware startups (ie. palmer et al.), especially wrt to underwriting venture financing from govt, like the chinese has done for solar and EV. Musk can and should be courted to be brought around with supervision of these programs
Musk completely discredited himself, and for absolutely no gain or even possible gain. He’s a liability with no political home.
The only saving grace of the whole thing is that Musk tied h1b to hatred of Americans in everyone’s mind.
This already has been happening for years with Andreessen Horowitz in the lead. See a16z.com American Dynamism 50.
Yeah i think adressen is doing gods work but its not nearly enough compared to the top down policy that is coming out of china. One datapoint: chinese regulators wont even allow douyin (tiktok china) to IPO; this is strong of a signal that china is sending to discourage “degen software” investments
Musk is an establishment rodeo clown, with all the limitations of being that.
Clownish sure, stunted man child, sometimes, but establishment, definitely not (Biden: “the justice department should investigate this guy”). And probably the person with the most experience in frontier industrial manufacturing, not least of which is from experience with the giga factory in Shanghai
Musk is smart, no doubt, but I believe his whole Doge stunt was a maneuver to hide in plain sight. "You see, I wasn't the problem. I tried to fix the place. I tried to make it work." As we move into an era where billionaires will be blamed for every social ill and where Luigis will pop up like dandelions, he'll have a manufactured alibi with Doge. Every one of his business lines is heavily subsidized. He's as enmeshed in the system as any defense contractor.
Not sure if it was an intended consequence, but its really due to DOGE that we confirmed that America operates more like a revolutionary empire bent on spreading its ideals to every person on the planet than the USSR could've ever dreamed of being
Been saying for a while that the biggest threat to the entire planet, not just Whites / White society, is the Chinsect plague.
Yeast-life that will grow and consume anything in its path with unimaginable speed, leaving nothing but fermenting waste in its wake.
If left unchecked they will rape the world of its resources until Earth looks like Mars.
Nuke the Three Gorges Dam, send 100 trillion Chinks directly to Hell
Cmon bruh. We have feelings too
Yuo are Chink?
Yep yep
Why do you torture animals?
The fear accentuates the flavor when we cook them afterwards
Idk if youre kidding or not, but Chinks actually believe that. Because they have insect brains
I think you confused China with India
India is horrible of course, but they dont have the same capabilities as Chinks
China does consider industry a jobs program - that’s precisely why they subsidize employment so heavily and are content to accumulate dollars in exchange for goods. In their mind, better to have an extra 5% of the population going to the factory to churn out widgets rather than collecting disability checks. The US, of course, has made the opposite decision.
That China-US mirror is perhaps the single key point your analysis misses: the US trade deficit (and its attendant joblessness) is the result, yes of overregulation, but also quite heavily of an overvalued currency. And it’s overvalued b/c China, the world’s surplus country, has a closed capital account. The US cannot forcibly open their capital account, the only solution is to make imports more expensive.
Countries running ~8% current account deficits as the US is now - at full employment, in peacetime! - are headed for a disastrous collapse, probably sooner rather than later. And because trade balances globally not bilaterally, we cannot simply target China - their surplus would find its way through intermediaries.
Tariffs are a clumsy, but effective stopgap solution.
This is true. China is engineering trade surpluses via capital controls and investment policies, and certainly views employment as a key goal of their economic policy, and they have been very explicit about this. Chinese want jerbs and the politicians prioritize it.
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202405/28/content_WS6655b06bc6d0868f4e8e78fa.html
In addition to massively innovative manufacturing, China is also the home of massively inefficient state owned firms that exist as jobs projects as much as they do for revenue.
China is a big, complicated place.
Chinese overcapacity is not pursued for mere employment. They’re seeding the ground for the future dominance of Chinese firms, Chinese goods and Chinese businesses.
That’s true, it’s a multifaceted issue. But it’s not a coincidence that loan growth to the industrial sector went parabolic just as the property boom was coming to a close - middle elements of the party said to themselves “oh sht, if we don’t juice manufacturing, all these construction workers are going to be jobless” so they told the state-backed banks to pump out loans and the banks did. And the result is enormous overcapacity.
Some of that may be ‘long term plan to dominate the world’, but a great deal too is ‘yikes! we’re in a tight spot maybe kicking the can down the road, making this the next guy’s problem, isn’t so bad’.
I will just echo Moonrat’s point. There are ways in which if you bring back basic commodity production, you’re training up the local know-how to engage in more ambitious manufacturing projects. A lot of innovation in manufacturing is the learn-by-doing incremental process efficiencies that you never get to master if you’re not engaged in production.
One last tidbit to spark your imagination. There are carryovers in applications between low level industry and high level ones based on pure functionality. The type of Filler equipment used in beverage production (all brands owned by Coke and Pepsi etc) are analogously applied in battery production. There is crossover in base level logic as well. For flat products like Nestea (alas… Fuze) we fill the can with Nitrogen to fill out the can: the exact same logic applies to batteries when you’re filling them.
So, our domestic North American capacity to make batteries is bolstered by existing tech from beverage production.
Reinstating basic commodity production as an "industry as a training program" is not necessary unless your existing working population is borderline incapable of ever producing truly ambitious projects anyway, and largely irrelevant to the re-invigoration of Americas industry. Smart young people do not need training on production systems for basic goods that can be produced to acceptable quality by an Indian teenager in a ramshackle factory anymore than an aspiring fine dining cook needs to work at Taco Bell. The learn-by-doing is possible in real time on advanced projects, provided that the working force is intelligent and under good leadership.
Some make a big deal of manufacturing knowledge becoming "lost" in the US but it is mostly what was once a job filled by smart and competent young men became a workforce thats a revolving door of bumbling morons and invalids, thus those that fulfill the more advanced and detailed oriented tasks in the production are simply the only competent people on the floor of the operation, and now quite old and set to retire. The knowledge that these old outgoing workers possess is not some kind of magic wisdom, its just intelligence and competency applied to understanding a process. The reasons for Americas industrial decay are largely as BAP states: a "moral-social-political framework that holds back the eminent in favor of the exigencies of brownification." which leads to a poor quality lower-middle and middle class that is incapable of being an advanced industrial labor force.
B- we’re dumping that America and anyone associated with it, I’ll spam you with good news… but I don’t want to ruin the Doomer buzz.
Let me know… 😎
The issues I see with development (or re-development) of a manufacturing infrastructure for basic commodities include a hostile regulatory environment and lack of labor force. There are major structural changes that need to be made and planned out before this can be implemented at a national level.
Smarter people than me will need to figure out how to convince people that climate change shouldn’t be the driving force behind every ridiculous environmental policy and that spending 15% -40% of a project’s total cost on faking reports to show no or “mitigated environmental impacts” is a colossal waste of resources. But as of now you simply can’t pencil out the costs of new manufacturing infrastructure in most cases.
We see stupid arguments almost daily whether or not kids should go to college or go into a trade and need back surgery by age 40. Ideally, the whole university system should be scrapped but I understand that is a pipe dream, as is the suggestion that private companies will foot the bill for on the job training. But, as college degrees become increasingly worthless due to DEI and other discriminatory policies against white men perhaps this is an angle that can eventually be revisited.
You’re one of the few to note that China, while clearly good at applied math/science and engineering (perhaps especially reverse engineering), is weak at true innovation and produces little true genius. South Korea is much the same story. Effective and pragmatic reindustrualization in the West will likely have long term benefits in real progress beyond what would be achieved if industry stays anchored elsewhere.
This is a great post, but my comment would be to avoid projecting European attributes onto China. Yes, China is already the world's dominant industrial power, but unlike European powers it does not use its dominance to conquer the world or impose influence except in very narrow and provincial terms for its near abroad.
The fact is that the Chinese are a myopic people obsessed with money and making money. They have no vision or idealism to conquer lands and impose their will. Their desire is simply to make ever more money.
That makes China in many ways a non-threatening actor for the West -- all the west needs to do is to refuse trade. Yes living standards will fall somewhat in the near term, but the west can always create space for itself while it sorts its own problems out, and there is really nothing China can do about it.
While this is all true, we must not scoff at efforts to recapture upstream production. Subsidising the production of basic commodities can build the foundation for more ambitious advanced manufacturing projects.
Yes, except that all this isn’t true.
I've been living and working in China for more than 15 years now, I've learnt a lot about Chinese history, ancient and modern, and the industrial history is a big part of that. I've been able to walk through it and see it with my own eyes, it's literally written into the landscape all around me as I type this.
I've also met and talked to many party members, professionally and social, and of all the dumb ideas I see coming out of America about China (no shortage of those) the idea that the Chinese people, high or low are motivated by some desire "to avenge the century of humiliation" has got to be one of the dumbest.
AVOID something similar from happening again, certainly, but AVENGE? That's absurd.
The CCP are crypto-neo-Confucianists and technocrats, they don't think like that, they don't work like that and they don't plan like that.
Coal and ore isn't being mined, factories aren't running, buildings aren't being built and a hundred other projects aren't underway to put Chinese gunboats up the Potomac and the Thames like the Americans and British did up the Yangtse.
The generally like BAP, I think he's an important thinker but his main failing is his weird feeling that the driving powers behind human society are psycho-sexual neuroses. Here we see mention of both repressed homosexuality and humiliation fetishism.
They can be the motivation for some individuals, maybe even certain social cliques, but they don't run the geo-politics of Empire, they never have, and they're not running the Grand Plan of Beijing today
There are a couple of things discouraging local production and innovation; one of them actually is the way finance capitalism presently works. The Chinese have a system of regional banks who help finance industry. So do the Germans with their landesbanks and hidden champion firms. Nothing like that exists in the US, but it did back when we were still making things. Banks in the US are these giant conglomerates that don't fund local industry or much of anything else. A band-aid from 2008 that was never ripped off (they should be broken up into local banks, and starting a new bank should be easier).
Worrying about HFT is retarded, and almost entirely from scumbag CDO dorks and inside traders being mad their brother in law in that business made bonus in 2009 and they had to look for a job for blowing up the world economy. Worrying about airlines and manufacturers being leveraged to the nostrils, or private equity looting productive companies and everything else seems like a bigger issue.
I think tariffs are fine. At worst it works like a VAT, which everyone else already has. When I buy crap from Japan (to Europe) I have to give some asswipe 23% of its value. I don't see anything wrong with Americans having to do this also. The absence of these taxes was arguably a problem for a few decades, and free trade zones did exactly what Perot said they would, aka "giant sucking sound."
Your article is missing a very large chunk of the economic history of Argentina.
In the first place, there were two Argentine regimes led by Juan Peron. You seem to be talking about the first one--the one that followed the 1943 coup by the GOU military lodge. of which Peron was a member, which eventually enabled his ascent to the Presidency in 1946. This is the reign that everyone remembers--Evita, and all that. Although Andrew Lloyd Weber musical would arguably have held much more entertainment value--or anyway prurient interest--if it had been followed by a sequel featuring the widower, the Conductor himself, into the Nelly Rivas years. That's how Juan eventually got the boot in late 1955, of course: after Evita's death, Juan took up with 14-year old Nelly Rivas as his mistress and common-law wife. Just a little too scandalous for the international community to handle, in particular the Vatican. It didn't help that Peron had responded to the outcry over his personal conduct by introducing measures to legalize divorce, grant legitimacy to children born out of wedlock, and legalize prostitution. The Pope excommunicated him. Which put the Argentine government in an uproar, forcing him to step down. (To cut a long and salacious story short. More details here. https://consortiumnews.com/1999/111299a.html )
The first Peron regime was famously populist, of course. Peron--a personalist leader not wedded to any particular ideology or economic theory, and initially influenced by the wife, Evita, and her championing of the Argentine common folk--made an alliance with the working classes, the decamisados, raising the minimum wage and making deals with the Argentine labor unions. That's why Peronism was elevated to legendary status as a "political philosophy": Peron's tenure in office led to tangible gains for the ordinary working people of Argentina. You couldn't call it socialism, or even autarky; Peron was trying to cut deals with David Rockefeller at the time he was forced out of office. Peron became a legend because when he was President, there was actually some give-back to the Argentine working poor. That's really all it takes to get a wave of popular appeal--run a government that makes sure that regular job-doing people get paid more than crumbs. So rare a thing in Latin America that he was revered by millions long after he stepped down in late 1955.
The second regime, in the early 1970s, that was different. Peron was barely there. He was in even worse shape than Joe Biden was in 2023. But he was brought back to power--his far-right allies even managed to get his excommunication reversed!* and lasted only around a year before dying in office in 1974. Whereupon his widow, Isabel took office...(to cut a long and salacious story short, once again. More details here. https://consortiumnews.com/1999/111299a.html )
(*up until very recently, the Argentine constitution required a candidate to be Roman Catholic in order to be eligible for the Presidency.)
The important part about Peron's second term is that the Argentine national debt at the time of his passing was only around $1 billion. And following the shambles of the Isabel Peron/Jose Lopez Rega government--which only lasted another two years--in March 1976, a military junta took over. And that's when the economy really went to hell. By the time the junta made its excuses and stepped down following the Falklands War fiasco in 1983, there had been so much private capital flight and plain old bust-out looting by the junta that Argentina hasn't gotten its head above water since.
timeline of Argentine public debt, 1824-2009*:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Argentina_deuda-pbi.jpg
(*it's very difficult to find a timeline graph on the Internet that goes back farther than 1992)
the accompanying story:
"...The military in control of the state took some of those petrodollar loans too: about 10 billions were used to buy weapons to finance state repression and insane war projects with Chile and the UK.
It wasn’t much compared to the private debt that all the big financial players had gotten into, though. But the state ended up paying for that too, by nationalizing it in 1982. It didn’t matter that much of the private debt wasn’t even real debt, but money that had been “loaned” from the headquarters of multinational corporations to their local Argentine branches, not to produce anything but to speculate on any of the wide variety of schemes explained above, and send the easy profits back as “repayments”. The state also didn’t get into too much trouble finding out how much debt was real and which one had already been paid back. If they are going to pay it all, I might as well claim I owe every cent I borrowed in history, especially if I’m going to be the one in charge of the audit, reasoned the bailed-out banks and companies.
By 1983, when the 8 years of military rule were over, public debt was 465% bigger than the year of the coup, and there wasn’t much to show for it in terms of improvements for ordinary Argentineans. Financial institutions and corrupt military officers had stolen most of it, and flown it out of the country, while Argentina was already lagging behind its scheduled payments since the Latin American debt bubble exploded in 1982.
By the time Raúl Alfonsín was elected into office, debt was unmanageable, with short-term due dates every other day, in the midst of a barely governable country, where the criminals that had been tormenting it for the last decade were in control of the military, police and trade-unions, in association with the parasitic businessmen who made their fortune during the dictatorship and now had amazing leverage over the economy..." https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/ignacio-portes-paul-singer-v-argentina-debt-come.html
check out the timeline at the beginning of the article below
https://manifold.bfi.uchicago.edu/read/case-of-argentina/section/9905ef24-8c94-42ad-adf7-068efb4d9afb
graph from the U. Chicago article for the years 1960-2015, showing the same track as the graph posted earlier https://manifold.bfi.uchicago.edu/api/proxy/ingestion_sources/2a3ae444-498a-45d5-af9a-e950f51cb1c7
That's the factor that's been ignored by practically every other news article on Argentine economic woes in the US national media: the enormous incompetence of the Isabel Peron (&Jose Lopez Rega) regime, 6/1974-3/1976, and the role played by the corrupt Argentina military junta that followed, 1976-1983.
Everyone's scratching their head over what the problem is with Argentina for the last 40 years, like it's all about ideology...could it be Peronism? Populism? Socialism? Teh Minoriteez?
Argentina was drowned in debt by those bandits in the Neofascist Junta years. That's what happened.
Everything since the fall of the military regime has clearly been the fault of leftist peronists. It is possible with reasonable policies for a country to recover from even great setbacks.
I’m waiting for a big takedown of BAP as happened with his cohort Yarvin. All these libertarian mischlings need to be exposed.
BTW I have been wary of Yarvin for years is there a specific incident I should know about other than his open shilling now for Zionism?
BAP probably literally sucks Peter Thiel's cock for a meal ticket.
They are all Jews or half Jew, and all likely on the Mossad and/or Palentr et. al payroll.
Anyone thinking poor and working class whites should be eating out of dumpsters or going without basic necessities are not our friends.
Poor and working class whites will be ok. You on the other hand…
You’re another one with your head firmly lodged up your ass like most of the dissident right or whatever you call these fags.
Who exactly thinks that?
Libertarians, Objectivist Ayn Rand cultists, Reagan-Romney Republicans, Clinton-Obama neoliberal Democrats.
Libertarians, keyboard Nietzschean Vitalists, autists who fantasize they will be EHC and other losers.
Could you mention any specific people and show evidence that they "working class whites should be eating out of dumpsters or going without basic necessities"?
For real. What the left calls “capitalism,” is simply how Jews behave. All those “libertarians” like Rothbard, Mises, etc were Jews.
Some things that most people don’t know about the Third Reich:
Was originally called National Socialist German Workers Party
Brought in interest free loans which was a boon to ordinary people
Had a program called “winter relief” which was basically mandatory for all non poor Germans to donate to, to help poor people especially mothers in the winter time.
While corporations were still privately held, they had to serve the German people or their business could be ended.
Hitler’s “racism,” was complicated and he went to see the Grand Muffti of Palestine to coordinate against the Jews. So he certainly was not so bigoted that he didn’t see Muslims as potential allies.
Volkswagon was people’s car for ordinary folks.
First 40 hour work week and mandatory vacations for worker at minimum in Europe and maybe in the world.
The majority of American fascists are going to be jews for demographic reasons. It is what it is.
Neither BAP nor Yarvin are fascists. They’re retarded libertarians who aspire to be Nietzschean supermen elitists.
It's keyfabe.
Kosher neoliberalism with Nietzschean gay bodybuilding characteristics. The middle classes don’t want libertarian economics.
Indeed, they don't because they're economically illiterate.
Neither do academics.
They want subsidies.
Few in real life can or do practice libertarian economics. I greatly admire Musk … and others… but the most important real life libertarian in our lifetime was Alan Greenspan.
It’s a scam.
If your view of America however is the besieged Ivy League and the Internet… and apparently occasionally interacting with dusky hued domestics without so much as an associates degree… you also might be alarmed at the approach of The Barbarians.
Waiting For The Barbarians would be an excellent title for this post and half the comments.
I’m a Barbarian myself… fine.
Buy how will the Jew bankers make trillions without useful idiots, sob!
There's way too many shortsighted people in positions of power today. It's insane how nobody can see the obvious long-term consequences of their shortsighted decisions.
There will certainly be an opening in the future for a new Elite to emerge to replace the old order. As the Chinese say a new mandate of heaven will emerge. Just like a barbarian tribe from the steppe.
They’re here and being referred to as … check notes “white nationalists.”
I suppose that’s better than White Gazans, we must be at least as frightening.
Thank you for writing this. Amazing read.
Also, Japanese physics and mathematics is excellent, and has been for a long time.
Japan is an example of a highly creative population that does have "vision" and has birthed such innovative mathematicians as Shigefumi Mori, Ito, Nakayama, Kobayashi, from the early 20th Century until the present. Japan is very different from China, which does have a serious dearth of mathematicians, their most impactful one being born in HK and educated in the US (S.T. Yau).
We shouldn't confused Japan and China, they are very different.
especially in fiber optics and communications technology in general
Japan keeps foreigners out.
Thoughtful article and well written. Thanks