CB, I had a look at the impossible trinity: <If China is ready to step up to the plate and be the hegemon, will there be a Pax Sinensis? And are you ready to be the hegemon?
My guess is no. I think China is at the apex of the triangle I posted earlier in the week, that nobody commented on, I assume because it's a frame of reference you are not familiar with. (Mundell-Fleming). Full capital controls. Full autonomy, full stability, no free flow of capital.
DJ is on the right side. Full stability, full free flow of capital, no autonomy.
The US is on the left side. Full free flow of capital, full autonomy, no stability.
mason.gmu.edu
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I hadn't seen that triangle before, but I've lived in a full-control system, through a big bang deregulation, stock market mania, leveraged assets and subsequent collapse [New Zealand from 1970 to 1991].
I've also lived through the multinational corporate world and seen untold numbers of such diagrams.
Such diagrams are always far too simple to describe what is really going on. What's really happening is a messy seething mass of 6 billion individuals interacting with a biosphere of vast trillions more and a little planet with limited resources in the middle of nowhere.
We don't fit into such triangles. Academics and Marxist Proletarian Planners do their triangular dialectics but the damn masses ooze out the edges and even a Berlin Wall and machine guns fail to stop them taking to Vodka, chess, revolution or even suicide to escape the 666 Triangle, which, eerily, your post was numbered - 18666 [18 = 6+6+6].
So, while it's true that two aspects of the triangle can be had, but not the third, it's not of much consequence in the real world - other than that autocratic people keep drawing triangles to try to squeeze us into.
What it's about is trying to keep the villagers in the cage. But they insist on flying the coop and mating with somebody nearby, spoiling the tribal order.
In the material world until the 19th century, it was relatively easy to define the world geographically and control gold flows and everything else. But now in the cyberspace era, with 747s, mass movement and abstract value, physical borders and tribal boundaries have less and less importance.
The Aryan Master Race made an attempt at empire and so did Japan, but they had the world against them. "Hegemony" is giving way to "Hedged money". I doubt we'll see a China hegemony.
It's a lot more fun in the left hand corner of the triangle [speaking from experience].
The triangle needs to include a variable - free flow of people [because they do flow]. |
