Mish (Mike Shedlock), the best economic blogger out there, has posted a video that was too disturbing for me to finish watching. You’ll have to go to the original post to see it. But you can read the text to figure out what he shows. Here is his added conclusion:
Several people were upset at this video thinking it does not belong in an economic blog. They are mistaken.
The perpetual story regarding China is that the country will grow without end, it will overtake the US, and rule the world.
Instead I propose the China story is really about rampant credit expansion, malinvestments, unproductive assets, no free capital markets, centralized planning that people mistake for capitalism, no real legal system, no freedom of speech, and no respect for either property rights or human rights.
All the people who think China is some sort of miracle savior for the world economy are going to find out otherwise.
I thought the point was obvious, but judging from the number of emails I received, obviously it was not.
My impression reading Mish is that he is a secular person. So I’ll add something that seems obvious to me. If you look at the names of most of our hospitals, even today, it is obvious that medical care in the West never developed purely from free market transactions. Such a free economy provided ad great deal of prosperity, and that prosperity gave the West resources to use for the sick and orphaned.
But the care for the sick and disabled in the West was never only a “service” purchased by “customers.” It was a Christian mission (and Jewish also).
(Note, I posted this yesterday, which is why I wrote “another version” in the title of this post.)