Happy

Does everyone want to be happy? We are told so ... but I have my doubts as to what this means. Are serial killers happy offing their next victim? Perhaps. Did OJ find joy in slashing the throats of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman? Perhaps. Did Pol Pot have a smile on his face as he slaughtered 2 million Cambodians? Perhaps. Was Chairman Mao gleeful when his Great Leap Forward starved to death perhaps ten million of his countrymen? Perhaps.

Obviously happiness is a very relevant thing. Monasteries and nunneries exist for a primary purpose of assuring a state of grace to their participants ... a distillation of happiness. We all believe that happiness should be all goodness and light. But this is clearly not the case. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that many people find comfort in things that most of us consider bizarre. Our newspapers would quickly fold if they could not report on the many aberrations and outright crimes perpetuated by anti-social creeps who are seeking out their own sick form of joy.

So, our classic notions of what motivate people may be right in the whole, but clearly misfire for large swaths of homo sapiens. Do we need to rethink what the guarantee “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence means? Perhaps we need a finer form of the word “happiness?” Specifying that it must be the benign form of this emotion?

I can’t think of a word for this constricted form of joy. Can you?

Afterward: Beatific?

Whoppers

Woke up this morning to see that the Shanghai stock index is up 3,1%. Wow!, this must mean that China agreed to the previously negotiated tirade terms ... and Trump held back on the new 25% tariffs. A little further investigation revealed that exactly the opposite happened and the Dow Jones futures indicated a down US market today. So why is the Chinese market up ... and up so much ... and ours might be down?

Dear reader, may I speculate here? I can visualize Xi Jinping turning to a subordinate after hearing that China’s power play didn’t work and Trump upped the tariffs ... and saying (in Mandarin Chinese), “Make the stock market go up.” And so it happened. This bit of psychological warfare is a side benefit of autocratic government control.

Often this type of single-point decision making is seen as an advantage of the Sino-form of capitalism ... whereas such market outcomes in the US are the net result of millions of back-and-forth decisions rolled up into an overall free-market result ... much, much less efficient ... but, far more democratic.

Which is really better? Well, the Chinese form is obviously more efficient ... but when they make a mistake (like the Great Leap Forward), it is usually a whopper ... and I don’t mean a hamburger.

Afterthought: And the million Muslims concentration camps might be at least a Big Mac ...

Chow Mein

I have written about the rising threat from China many times before ... see: China vs. U.S.

Watching cable TV recently I saw a former ambassador to China opine on how this country differs from the USA. His primary point was that Beijing runs things top-down ... whereas we govern bottom-up. He referenced some recent autocratic developments in China to support this premise:

- a Chinese government attempt to profile everyone of its 1.3 billion citizens as to their loyalty to Beijing ... including a plan to insert state operatives into the homes of suspicious residents.

- the opening of reeducation (concentration) camps across its country to deal mostly with Muslim and Christians of questionable loyalty

- its attempt to get Google to develop a special search engine in China ... allowing authorities to monitor and censor how their people interact with the Internet there.

To me, China's autocratic top-down approach to government ... sitting atop the swing to capitalism is a lot more efficient than the clumsy bottom-up democratic approach here in America. However it also has a major flaw -- when they make a mistake it's a whopper ... witness Mao's "Great Leap Forward" started in the late 1950s that killed over tens of millions of its citizens.

The U.S. bottom-up democratic method is inefficient, yes, but it is also self-correcting. Democracy is far less likely to continue with a gigantic legislative boner that destroys far more than it helps. Will Xi Jnping, now Chinese president for life, make some monstrous mistakes with his  unchecked governance decisions? You bet your chow mein!