China: the new city on the hill

Pete Beinart of The Daily Beast bummed because utterly hopeless Keynesian economics died two nights ago.

It wasn’t the Democrats. It was the belief that government spending must shrink. Peter Beinart on the GOP’s lunatic notion of America’s exceptionalism—and how it could help get Obama re-elected.

Historians may also look back at 2010 as the first post-9/11 election in which fears of China loomed larger than fears of Al Qaeda. Given that China has stimulated its way out of recession and is set to pour even more government money into infrastructure, leaving America further behind, I doubt it will be the last. In his Senate victory speech, Republican megastar Marco Rubio announced that “America is the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind” because “almost every other place in the world…what you were going to be when you grow up was determined for you.” Almost every other place in the world? From China to India to Brazil, hundreds of millions of people are rising economically in ways their parents could scarcely have imagined, in part because their governments are investing in infrastructure in the way the United States did in the late nineteenth century. The American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America. And rather than looking at what those other countries are doing right, the Republicans have taken refuge in an anti-government ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world. That ideology won last night, and Keynesianism lost. Have a good day!

We have found that when statists talk about "thinking big" it is with exclusive respect to government programs. "Thinking big" in the context of expanding opportunities via the expansion of liberty are foreign concepts. What's wrong with greatness? What is so unseemly about being and continuing to strive for exceptionalism?

We note with irony that the author chooses two beacons of "countries on the rise" (China and Brazil), two countries that are not afraid to exploit their natural resources, a concept we have developed a complete aversion to over the past few decades.

Again, thinking big with the liberal-Left entails dictating your health care decisions, filling potholes (infrastructure!) and building wind turbines (which no one seems to want in their backyards) which require rare earths from... China.