Being Chided by China is a poor joke, especially when we should chide ourselves and starve the government spending beast!
from National Review's Happy Warrior, December 21, 2011
A headline from the Daily Telegraph of London:
IMF Drawing Up £500bn Package to Save Italy, Spain and the Euro.
Insofar as most of us give any thought to the International Monetary Fund, we vaguely assume it's there to help developing nations. But it's now bailing out First World advanced economies. Indeed, Italy is a member of the G7, which is supposed to be the super elite of the developed world. But it's angling for a 600 billion–euro rescue package.
So it's a good thing we've got this IMF thingy to hand when we need someone flush enough to prop up soi-disantEuropean economic powerhouses. But where exactly does the IMF get its money from? Ah, well. America provides 17.7 percent of the IMF's funding, which is more than the next three biggest contributors (Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom) combined. So, in a 600 billion–euro bailout for Italy, 106.2 billion euros — or about $143 billion — will come from the United States. Which is to say, you.
But don't panic. You're pretty much tapped out. The United States recently bust through the $15 trillion debt ceiling to set a new all-time world record as the Brokest Nation in History. So another $142 billion barely rates a line item.
Oh, by the way, the IMF itself has spent most of the last few years operating with a $400 million budget deficit. So a broke G7 economy is being bailed out by a broke transnational organization funded by a broke hyperpower. That seems likely to work.
The jig is pretty much up for the post–World War II global order. It's becoming increasingly hard to avoid the thought that, when it comes to the Western world, there's no there there. There may be a there out there somewhere else, but chances are you're paying for that, too. The put-upon taxpayer of an industrial nation accepts that the bulk of his contribution to the "international aid" budget is entirely wasted: The traditional quip, made by many people, from the great Peter Bauer to Ron Paul more recently, is that it's poor people in rich countries funding rich people in poor countries. But that bon mot doesn't seem quite to cover the revelation that the U.S. Agency for International Development gives foreign aid to China. ...
"The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entree to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel." In a sense, the Communists have simply inverted the "false front": Behind the glittering skylines of the coastal megalopolises lies a vast peasant hinterland in which not even the non–cave dwellers are in danger of being mistaken for a consumer society....
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