So I was walking out of one of my consulting gigs today and I noticed some fat cat had not picked up his copy of the Wall Street Journal. As it was Friday night at 6 p.m. I figured it would be OK to repurpose the paper to provide me with some diversion while I ate my roast beef sandwich at the sub shop. The front page had a big article about how overheated China’s economy was getting, what with”sizzling” growth rates of 10.2% last year. There was lots of verbiage about how it was bad for the Chinese economy to grow too fast.
“Too much economy” – what an image. Remember Will Ferrell in the movie “Zoolander”? It’s toward the end, and he’s standing on the runway with his pointy white hairdo, scream- ing: “Enough already … Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
How can there be too much economy? Are there too many hands shaking? Too many contracts being signed? Too many people getting new and better jobs? Too much high-quality, low-cost merchandise flooding the shelves? Have I lost my frigging mind? Am I taking crazy pills?
Buried deep in the article, there was a tiny sliver of reason. The writer alluded to capital formation and value creation that can be too chaotic and wasteful. But think about it. It’s as if you built a road or a sea trawler all willy-nilly and then regretted it and had to repurpose it as the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good. Well, that, as we technical people say, would be a second-order effect. Get- ting “economy” earlier in time is just as beneficial as having a career that pays you six figures right out of college. Sure, you might piss some of it away; but you and the world would be far better off than if the money had been dribbled out to you over decades so it could be “managed” by fat-cat opportunists trying to use political means to steer undeserved benefits to a privileged few.
No, the real reason the power elite want to slow down China’s economy is so they can get all their deals lined up and their market power established and political pull installed, and then they can make sure to exclude those uppity people
If its boycott doesn’t work, the American Family Association could ceremoniously set DVDs on fire. It describes itself as an organization for “people who are tired of cursing the darkness and who are ready to light a bonfire. “
who didn’t go to the right schools and are not the right color or religion. They hate speed, chaos, and efficiency, because they hate anything that might impede their keeping control and maintaining power.
But it is obvious that they are as dumb as a bag of hammers if they think “economy” is bad, and it is obvious that they will be left behind and replaced by the nouveaux riches, that aristocracy of merit they so despise for being so elegantly able to outthink and outwork the stupid and lazy sons and daughters of America’s old money.
I am so glad that Craig’s List and other sites on the internet are putting the newspapers out of business. It’s about time, if the newspapers think their readers are stupid enough to fall for such drivel. The Journal’s track record on Big Policy is not so stellar. The last big idea it pushed was the unilateral attack on Iraq. Boy, that sure worked out swell. Maybe the Journal should stick to printing yesterday’S ticker and leave the complex self-organizing behavior to the”economy.”
Besides, all these wasteful copies of the Journal lying around unread in the reception rooms of corporate America make it obvious that the paper has grown too fast, all willy- nill)T, and needs to have its growth limited, for its own good, you know, so there’s less waste and stuff.