Drag Days
By Rhodo Zeb. Filed in Bridges |Tags: economic.realities, 工商法
We are entering a period that will be very difficult and painful, economically and politically. The economy is not going to respond to the stimulus, well, other than the stock market going crazy and the re-inflation of the housing bubble that already exists.
The government doesn’t have methods of helping the private economy expand. Hell, they barely tolerated the private economy just a few years ago. Indeed, the government only has rudimentary methods of infusing wealth into the economy. [Here, large corporation, pls take these lovely RMB and go buy foreign assets as we go global!] Why do you think the ‘results’ of the stimulus are being felt already? Fully a tenth of that cash has already been siphoned off to corruption and graft by now, and I am not saying that derisively at all. That’s just reality anywhere you happen to be.
Of course the government can intensify public works spending to drive things forward, and there are still lots of good opportunities for such projects, obviously. However, the problem is that the method used does not lead to any follow-on economic growth.
In China’s system, the workers will come into the cities, do the work, and then go home, and do that for years, I suppose, until it comes time to just find some work closer to home, making much less money but spending less money as well. They have basically zero opportunity for advancement other than some sort of minor promotion within the system. As a worker, and as the system is political, this is an effective ceiling.
You can provide these projects for 30 years, and all you will get is a bunch of old, experienced workers, waiting for the next project to come up.
In a Western system, an outside company would be asked to provide services, at least at some level. We went through the whole outsourcing crazy back in the 90s, but even before that, we were using outside firms. And of course, it is true that this can allow for corruption possibilities that might not exist otherwise, however these private firms provide opportunities for workers to advance their own careers.
The cycle is not easy at all in the US, I freely admit, but it is there, to some extent. And then the next step in this line is the difficulties China has in lending money to SMEs when political considerations take precedence.
Internalizing the entire process might save money, but it just makes the government the only employer in town, with everyone dependent, and that is not stable, I would wager. In order to gain the full effects of these dollars spent, you must consider the career life-cycle of the workers, and where they can go in their own paths.
In any case, we are well into this recession of ours, and may indeed be in recovery. However, on both sides of the océano Pacífico I find significant weaknesses and unresolved (if not acknowledged) problems.
And we don’t know how bad things are going to get.
Yet.
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Fascinating story surrounding Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, here at the Times Online.
I read a great deal of Waugh in my younger days, and loved the dry wit and preposterous situations. Waugh’s keen eye captures the banality of the rich so very well, and without perhaps the Socialist cynicism of a Jack London. His travelogues aren’t bad either.
Read the story. The King of England exiles a citizen completely outside any legal systems…a man who committed crimes, yes, but crimes that natural law does not recognize.
Just so the sordid, corrupt aristocracy could continue to tell itself secrets. Wealth makes the children rotten; there is no other result possible in an unjust world.
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The censors are so much fun. Right now, results from yahoo search are cut off, just flat blocked, but when I went to google (to translate the ‘Pacific Ocean’) the first link was to education.yahoo…which worked just fine! Anyway, bad yahoo bad!