The new issue of Chronicles contains the usual odd mix of anti-statism and statism blended into a strange brew that recalls the Free Silver Populism of the late 19th century (down with taxes and up with inflation! Down with Wall Street and up with protection! ). There are good articles, such as Doug Bandow’s attack on the government census, and Ted Galen Carpenter’s warning against military intervention in the Sudan. But it also contains some of the most over-the-top rhetoric against China—you know, the country that has made most of what we buy affordable and made it possible Americans to do better things with their time than make dishes, small electronics, and firecrackers—that you can find in any publication.
So we begin with William Hawkins vowing to “drive Chinese goods off the continent.” This is not a charming thought since it would mean a vast increase in the prices of most consumable goods, provided that they are available at all, which would require a massive shift in labor and capital away from productive uses to unproductive uses.
But Hawkins is nothing compared with a piece by Larry Eubank (author of The Case Against Capital) which vacillates between claiming that trade with China is making us poorer and also arguing that economics isn’t everything, so we should be willing to accept poverty in exchange for keeping our nation “secure,” and it is the latter topic that really gets him going:
We’ve also giving them all our advanced technology and educating their college students in our universities — so much so that an American student in an upper-level computer-science or nuclear-pysics course nowadays feels like a stranger in a strange land. And it’s a hostile one: Chinese students in American universities are openly disdainful and hostile to white Americans.
I don’t want to be Mr. PC here but, truly, it strikes me that there is something really despicable about inflaming race conflicts—or creating them, for I see no evidence for his claim at all, and, truly, it is the first time I’ve heard it—for the political end of enhancing state power. Further, what I don’t get is this love/hate relationship that paleos have with government. They loathe the big government their very policies require, and dread the anti-nationalism that freedom they claim to support would bring about.
