In a recent news report about how bad it is living under centralized power and social credit domestic surveillance in China, there is mention of a social media meme about living during the “garbage time of history.” The translation may not be ideal, because it is likened to the end of an NBA basketball game when the outcome is settled.
If one team is up by 20 points with just 1 minute left to go, the outcome is settled, so the basketball teams merely “go through the motions” of pretending to continue to compete with one another. Everyone already knows the outcome, so why push yourself? You might risk an injury and it will not change the outcome.
But whether the “garbage time of history” is taken as just “hard times” or as “times where there is absolutely nothing that you can ever do to alter the outcome” it still pays to ask where “garbage times” come from. Here is a chart showing that basic assumptions by humankind end up altering whether people thrive or not:
In this particular outcome, the arrow for knowable truth and virtue ethics was stronger, leading to a snowball or trickle-down effect that resulted in broad and sustainable human happiness. But forces have been working for over 100 years to grow the arrow on the left, tipping the scales so that the ball rolls down the left:
And here we are in 2024, in a “garbage time of history.” But it isn’t something you can achieve without actively working for it. There are stories about people escaping the lack of hope and optimism characteristic of communist China (emphasis added):
Despite her well-paying tech job, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked for help running a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure.
The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, hopes one day to start an online business importing furniture from her home country.
“I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.”
Li is among a new wave of Chinese migrants who are leaving their country in search of opportunities, more freedom or better financial prospects …
One question you might ask is: Which mistake are the Communist central planners making in China, in order to have created all of the economic stagnation that is happening there now?
But that’s the wrong question.
It isn’t that a certain part of the government intervention in China is wrong, it’s that all of government intervention is wrong, everywhere that it is performed. The intervention involves the fatal conceit that technocrats know better and that their wishes and opinions need to be implemented with the force of law.
But these “intervention-ocrats” never know better, though their decisions can be formed so as to benefit themselves and their cronies. This special-interest/special access benefit is in fact the reason why centralization and domestic surveillance are propagated even though they do not lead to good outcomes.
It’s because there is a narrow, though immoral, benefit to controlling others. But the control freaks end up sinking the boat, because they do not respect the finality of economic laws. Instead, they think they can sustainably prop-up economies. The intervention-ocrats in Soviet Russia thought they could force through investments.
Instead of learning from Soviet Russia, China is replicating that behavior, and “over-investing” in ghost towns that remain unpopulated, shopping malls that nobody visits, expensive bridges barely used, and myriad other boondoggles. But the correct behavior is capitalist: allow for consumer sovereignty (e.g., “customer is always right”).
While investment was high in Soviet Russia, look at how low consumption was for the actual consumers (people) that lived there:
Yes, you can “force through” investments with central planning, but not sustainably — as the Soviets found out by 1991. China has been repeating their mistake. And worse, even the USA is becoming more centralized and more of a Surveillance State as time goes on. China has an “excuse” for the blunder:
They’re Communists (actually ‘fascists’ due to extensive public-private partnerships)
But there is no excuse for a United States government that economically intervenes and that implements domestic surveillance. We are doing them for the same reason that all nations do:
In order to provide narrow, unjust benefit to government cronies at the public’s expense.
Reference
1991 United States General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the Soviet Economy. https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-274.pdf