Firstly reread the item that I wrote on August 1st, 2012 called: "Trading issues with the Chinese".
I raised a bit of a furore with a comment that I wrote on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. I made two suggestions what China should do in the foreseeable future. My two simple suggestions were:
1. Hold democratic elections.
2. Float its currency the same as every other country does.
The first of these drew fire from different non-Chinese critics who told me that democracy does not work - one from Scotland pointing out that the UK Conservative government receives very little support in Scotland (true enough) and that the government was taking action of which most Scots disapprove (again reasonable enough). The same could, incidentally, be said of my native North of England.
And there is no doubt that we are prone to see an increasingly corrupted version of democracy with the first past the post system in many countries. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives has been playing a game of brinkmanship recently - closing down parts of the government, threatening a debt default. They are only in a position to do so as they gerrymandered the districts in the first place. At the 2012 elections they received overall over million votes fewer nationally than the Democrats for the House seats and have a majority in the region of 30.
Meanwhile the current UK coalition is a rare example of a government where more than 50% of voters in the UK voted for the parties in question. The abominable Margaret Thatcher, for example, never gained more than 43% of the vote and wreaked havoc - mainly upon the people who did not vote for her!
OK. But remember that democracy is more than just a political procedure - it is the ability to involve yourself in all sorts of actions that are not possible under a dictatorship. The Chinese equivalent of the Occupy movement would have been crushed far more brutally under its dictatorship for example. And the chances are that blog writers like myself would have been imprisoned in many different countries (and maybe even tortured) for publishing some of the views that are expressed in them. See what would happen to atheist bloggers in Iran or Saudi Arabia for example!
And think of Germany and dictatorship - even for one second - without blanching at the thought of what happened last time. "Antifa und stolz darauf" - that I can say and think in a democracy!
The point with democracy is to improve it - rather as I have said about the EU. The way to deal with the EU's many faults is to improve it (and democratise it fully).
Meanwhile we have the point about the Chinese currency. A Chinese writer complained about my suggestion that the currency markets are too liberal and that would be harmful to Chinese interests.
All well and good.
They are also for the record too liberal for a lot of other countries round the world. See what happened to the Rouble in Russia in the 1990s or the Baht in Thailand in 1998.
The point that writer missed though is obvious. We have a global economy - an often nasty animal that stands up and bites the people who can least afford it, while rewarding those who are already so well-off they wouldn't notice how much money they made in the last 60 seconds.
We are all signed up to the rules of this, like it or not. So if you want to take part, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.
If all the countries signed up to the various trading agreements started making noises about how it was not in their interest, most of these agreements would collapse. I personally need some persuading myself that Europe should not impose some sort of protectionism, with allowances made for African countries as the only exception, but general principle says that would be a "bad thing" (exports would be badly affected in the short term at least).
But the fact remains that the ludicrously cheap fixed exchange rate for the Chinese currency is killing industry and jobs everywhere else in the world (see also the article above). There is only one argument against obliging the Chinese to float their currency - THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE DOES! - and that would be the inflationary impact. That item at my local electronic store costing 5 Euro may well now cost 14 Euro?
Perhaps, but then I might be able to find an article of the same kind made in Spain or Greece (or even the UK) for 10 Euro. In other words it would provide the possibility for booting up the European manufacturing base, and create jobs here.
So what is fair to everyone else might not be in China's interest - but why should the rules be skewed to work for them and nobody else? It makes no sense and we are shooting ourselves in the foot by letting the situation continue to exist!
The chances though of getting Europe's politicians (individually or as a collective body) to act on this? Yes, well .... In the week that the news appeared that according to the latest opinion poll in France the neo-Fascist Front National are ahead of the rest, you begin to despair of any intelligent or reasoned solutions ever being adopted. Sadly for us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment