When anybody defending the accused is automatically accused of the same crime, and any demand for evidence of the charge is seen as an extension of the original crime, you are following the logic of a witch hunt.
Someone has to stop this, and first and foremost that means the liberal establishment. The leaders of universities, foundations, museums, the media and corporations need to draw on their remaining moral authority to make the case for a liberal society. There is a risk that anyone who speaks up, however reasonably, will become a mob target. But if one or two lead, perhaps others will follow.
George Melloan reviews Matthew Klein’s and Michael Pettis’s book, Trade Wars are Class Wars. A slice from the review:
What does ring true is that China is in some trouble. Authoritarian regimes invariably misallocate resources, and, as the book details, the Communist Party has excelled at economic waste. Its state-owned enterprises have run up huge bank debts, many of which yield no interest and won’t be repaid. Indeed, the country is swimming in debt. The authors say that “tightening credit” is needed but add that it could end up “strangling investment before complementary reforms have succeeded in lifting household incomes and boosting domestic consumption.” If wage cuts and unemployment result, China’s political system “might not survive.”
Robert Samuelson laments the sad reality that “the mother of all bailouts isn’t finished yet.”
The old paradigms missed the causes of these problems in ways that highlight the appeal of the “patterns of sustainable specialization and trade” paradigm. Despite its seeming novelty, this paradigm is not a new theory of macroeconomics; rather, it reaches back to the roots of modern economics in the classical economists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo — two of the most prominent economists of the era — explained the benefits of trade based on specialization and comparative advantage, respectively. These concepts remain as useful today as they were when Smith and Ricardo first articulated them.
