Lee Smith on China and the U.S. A few representative excerpts:
he [President Trump] failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.
. . .Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.
. . .The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.
File this one under: poses a dilemma for libertarians.
I put this author, Lee Smith, in my FIT short list picks in the previous thread for this article.
One gripe with the quoted paragraphs: China has been paying US professors, not for intellectual theft as Lee Smith says, but to buy influence and leverage and control the narrative and culture.
I made a mental note to add Lee Smith to my personal FIT after reading that article too.
As far as your quibble goes– I assumed that Smith had in mind (perhaps among others) Charles Lieber, who was the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department when he was arrested a year ago.
It is certainly both.
Leaders of a nation do not imprison their citizens. They may ask them to black-out their lights to prevent Nazi barbarians from destroying the nation. To which libertarians would object that they have the right to have their neighbors killed…
When Roman magistrates were sworn in on a stack of sacred books,the priest would warn them that any deviation would have them thrown from the Tarpeian Rock. Them he would murmur:”Memento salus populi suprema lex esto.” “Remember that the salvation of the people must be your supreme law.”
“ Leaders of a nation do not imprison their citizens.”
Great point. Julie Kelly has done great work covering the taking of political prisoners. FIT?
If he actually read the referenced Baker NY Mag lab leak story he’d learn Covid was designed in CHAPEL HILL, NC with manufacturing exported to Wuhan.
Too much great man theory in that piece. China’s GDP per capita is Mexico. Not a threat. & The lockdowns were politically popular, both L & R & worldwide. People like to be imprisoned when scared & won’t even blame the cabal of Western virologist/intellects who created this virus, whom ALL turn into creationist kooks when asked where this came from.
I was happy to see the article end on an uplifting note on the “good news.” That’s the kind of optimism that I’m looking for…as I start subscribing to more prepper channels.
If Lee Smith has something to say he should say it in less than 7000 words. I won’t be led along the garden path. Make concrete allegations and propose actions. It’s odious to insinuate. If he is competent he can be plain about his uncertainty.
Personally I am not against some form of restrictions in a pandemic, but this pandemic does seem to be a perfect situation for Hayekians to defend the value of local knowledge.
Consider the Imperial simulations. It was assumed that lockdowns increase at home transmissions by 25%, as far as I can tell this appears to be a made up number . How sensitive are the supposed benefits of a lockdown to this parameter? Were the simulations ever run with other values? Is there a point where the benefit of lockdowns vanish? Is this the same for all communities, including Italian style extended family communities and those comprising smaller households? Maybe it doesn’t matter but having been involved in simulation for a very long time, it is the sort of question which would normally be raised very quickly.
The lockdown simulations are network based models, lockdowns work by indiscriminately breaking links in the network without any consideration of the cost (economic or social) of breaking the link or its transmissibility. Network models are common in logistics, it is well known that you can break a lot of links without really changing the final result, which is why critical path analysis exists. While I do think lockdowns had some mitigating effect, I bet one could model feasible scenarios where a lockdown could make a pandemic worse. Maybe Northern Italy was such a case?
“It had never been used before as a public health measure”
Apparently you haven’t spent much time reading about historical responses to pandemics, going back at least as far as the 1300s. I was indeed used, often with rather less humanity or flexibility than today.
Early Lee Smith quote is so important:
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.
One of the biggest reason thinking non-elites support Trump over Democrats is on the “Free Trade” hypocrisy of accepting a managed trade, not free, where the USA loses huge amounts of manufacturing and employment, in return for higher corporate profits for the few elite at the top.
On the issue of “failing to staff”, let’s recall the CCP allied US elite and their illegal spying and lying. They pushed Gen Flynn to confess to lying, depriving Trump of one ally. The Russian Hoax failed to get Trump directly, but did catch a couple of Trump allies in minor illegalities which, when pushed, were enough to shove them into jail.
AND send a clear, loud signal that Trump couldn’t protect any guilty allies. How many DC swamp movers & shakers are really innocent? Certainly not Clinton nor Biden – but if the swamp refuses to prosecute, not trial, no jail. No harm (to elites), no foul. Clinesmith pleads guilty and 0, zero, nada on the jail time. FBI criminals walk free.
“Lock Her Up” was one big promise Trump failed – he thought it was politics and was trying to make a deal, but it was really Intel Communities at war. Against him, not Russia nor China.
Who is getting how much from China, now?
Tom Grey said… “the USA loses huge amounts of manufacturing and employment”.
I think it’s better if we let people follow incentives to evolve the economy towards ever higher levels of aggregate real income. It seems to work in that in recent years (say since the 1980s) deflation was avoided, high inflation was avoided, and in recovery from stresses (S&L bust, dot com bust, housing bust, or pandemic) the unemployment rate tended to get to 5% or lower.
If you insist on government managing the level of manufacturing you’re giving a handout in some form of a manufacturing subsidy. For example taxing imports is essentially handing domestic manufacturers the power to collect more money. You need to be explicit that you want something like that or else you look disingenuous or uninformed.