[PEN-L:9400] Re: a warning from the nanny

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>"Henry C.K. Liu" wrote:
>
> > Devine attacks China for opposing capitalist unions.
> > He defends Harry Wu, even after he has been given some basic facts.
> > He wants to promote Western democracy in socialist China.
> > He buys into all the propaganda slandering about China without
>any effort to
> > verify any facts.
> > I have already explained in a previous post that my use of the
>term "you" is
> > meant to designate typical US positions which Devine repeated in his posts
> > on the thread.
> > He uses bogus democracy as a weapon in support of imperialistic propaganda.



>Brad's note was sure to provoke Henry and he rose to the bait.  We have had
>some excellent exchanges recently.  Let's not let this degenerate again.
>
>--
>Michael Perelman

Look:

We all know that--sometime in the next thirty years--the wheel of
Chinese politics will turn sufficiently that someone at the peak of
authority will decide that it is politically advantageous to truly be
"China's Khrushchev." He will then with ample archival documentation,
tell us many things: from the apparatus's real best estimates of the
death toll from the Great Leap Forward to how Lin Biao was
assassinated to how the suppression of unions in the 1990s was
intended to reduce urban wages and further enrich the joint
business-party ruling class that had developed since the death of Mao.

Are we supposed to pretend--now--that we know none of this? And if so, why?


Brad DeLong


-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory
of money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading
guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead.
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long
past the ocean is flat again."

--J.M. Keynes
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
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