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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (69265)	12/8/2010 11:13:59 AM
From: Hawkmoon	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218935

Dunno if there is a heck of a lot of respect for government here in the west either... LOL!! I agree.. However, that's not the point that I'm trying to make.. The only thing that separates an Authoritarian or Totalitarian form of government from one that is accountable to it's people is the democratic process. Without elections, governments are all the same.. "We the Elite" versus "We the People".. Think about the founding of America, or even ancient Greece and Rome.. When the ruling elite lost their legitimacy, they were placed in a position where they were required to draw it from the citizenry. This is why I find it so difficult to take what TJ says with anything more than a grain of salt. He obviously disdains the democratic process, yet tries to claim that the ruling elite in Bejing are no longer "communists".. It's self-delusion and such statements undermine any credibility in the rest of his views. There is no doubt that Lenin was a Marxist. Yet, when the Russian economy was falling to pieces in 1921, he permitted capitalists to invest in Russia under the guise of "state capitalism" being the last stage before socialism evolved: en.wikipedia.org But it ultimately was halted because Capitalism, by it's very nature, requires state leadership to relinquish power to the private sector. This is implicitly at odds with the very concept of a command economy. In sum, what I perceive is occurring in China is similar to what Lenin and subsequent Soviet leaders attempted.. They desired a capitalist "shot in the arm" that would help them compete with the West, but when the private market ultimately threatened their power, they pulled the rug out from under the reforms and nationalized western investments. I see the same thing eventually occurring in China. They will ride this capitalist "sugar high" for as long as they can control it. But when it becomes a threat to their power, they will seize all the western investments in the name of the state. We can all hope that my views are incorrect, but my sense is that the power elite are loath to relinquish their authority, especially if it requires answering to corporate leaders and capitalist. After all, they've built their entire political "street cred" by being in opposition to capitalism, especially the Kuomintang and the "three principles of the people" upon which that party was founded: en.wikipedia.org Maoism is the identity for the political elite. If they were REALLY SERIOUS about reform, they would remove the label "Communist" from their party name. Hawk