In Defense of the US

Gross domestic product per capita is the fundamental measure of a society's material standard of living over time. Right now when people are making a lot of noise about China surging ahead with its economy, please note, the US economy is numero Uno still, and much higher than the next two economies put together! Though Europeans certainly live very well, and though both China and India are rapidly improving their citizens' standards of living, the United States remains indisputably ahead.

The MIT economist Robert Solow had in a paper substantiated that only about 12.5% of all growth in output per work-hour over a 40-year period he studies could be accounted for by increased use of capital; the remaining 87.5% was "attributable to technical change," or innovation. The US approach to achieving innovation has varied with the times, but it has generally demonstrated an almost ruthless pragmatism in implementing the core principles of free markets and strong property rights, overlaid with decisive government investments in infrastructure, human capital, and new technologies. I remember reading some time back that despite relatively small populations and lover scores across inputs like R&D, Switzerland and Sweden have produced many top global companies and at one point Switzerland ranked No.1, Sweden No.2, and the US was still ranked No.3.

For 100 years from 1870, the goals of conquering disease, educating the unschooled, and winning wars provided the strongest impetus for the US government's investments in innovation. This remains central to the American ethos, and in certain respects, the New Deal and later developmental interventions in Japan, and other countries during the post-World War II can be seen as extensions of this program, in which egalitarian ideas played an ever-increasing role.

It is so easy to give a backhanded compliment to the Americans saying “US industrial might and the blood of Russian soldiers that won the war”! Don’t forget the Soviet Union had signed a pact with Hitler ealier in the hope of dividing the world between them. But the Germans had other plans, and USSR had to be literally helped out in the war with Germany, and after the defeat of Germany, they swallowed the most industrialized part of Germany and colonized it for 43 years, while the Americans helped the defeated Germany to develop a decent democracy, quite independent of US influence though part of NATO!

Yes, the USA replaced the British Empire in politico-economic spheres without being an imperial power. It helped democracies and fought Communism which was antithetical to modern democracy.

You may remember it was an American President, a former General, Eisenhower who criticized the Military-Industrial complex. It can be seen that while military-to-commercial 'spin-offs' declined, gradually "commercial-to-military 'spin-ons' boomed. US military incursions and wars have been numbered but on analysis, it could be seen that the US spent huge resources in those wars with no economic benefit at allT Take the Iraq war, though critics said it was about exploiting Iraq’s considerable oil deposits, but the US didn’t touch it. In Syria, it was again a couple of trillion dollars spent with no benefit, except defeating the ISIL. In Afghanistan, they spent 3 trillion dollars trying to promote democracy for 20 years, and left the country abruptly without any benefit on either side!

The Leftists who worry about the huge corporate salaries, bonuses, etc however seem to be happy about billionaires like George Soros, Pierre Omidyar et all, who love taking pro-Left positions for it assuages their conscience for becoming billionaires through pure speculation or the sin of good luck!

The comments about Donald Trump are totally unreasonable. That man had good education, he had a good running business, and he came into politics just to show what a decent gentleman do in a democratic polity. Before the “China Virus” invaded the world, Donald Trump built the world’s most prosperous economy. America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times experts’ projections. the unemployment rate reaching 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century. Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low the number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record. Yes, he could be called names for his slogan MAGA, but he did bring jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA. Trump’s policies provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year. He negotiated with Japan, arm twisted a recalcitrant China, and so on to establish fairer and reciprocal trade.

Trump’s prospects for re-election were dragged down by a pandemic. He declared a National Emergency on early in March 2020 when there were less than 2000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US, and fewer than deaths when Europe is now the "epicenter" of what was later to be a global pandemic.  The media criticized him; the Democratic called him when he stopped flights from China, ad implemented shutdowns and social distancing across almost every US state which succeeded in stopping the exponential spread of the virus. In hard-hit states like New York, Michigan, and Louisiana, the pandemic's growth curve bent downward soon. What was once a runaway crisis in these hotspots has been controlled. Yet in an election year, the Democrats and the media controlled by them could run a campaign against Trump and fail the country! He was a victim of propaganda and a ganging up the riff-raff flowing as illegal immigrants into the country. They created a nationwide uprising over ‘systemic racism’ which was a big lie. (Black Democrat and Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson had written as early as in the early 1990s: "The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations and its stubborn refusal to institute a rational, universal welfare system, is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or Black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of Black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa.) Even in defeat, Trump won millions more votes than he did four years ago. It was hardly the abject repudiation of Trump’s ideas and methods!

Joe Biden of whom ex-US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, he “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” is POTUS46! I believe the decline of America your friend writes has started with Joe Biden Presidency. I saw it as he took a victory lap over a botched, haphazard evacuation calling it a “success” when so many American citizens and those who helped the U.S. war effort were been left behind in Afghanistan! Biden turned a twenty-year victory at the cost of $3trillion over Islamic barbarism in the country that attacked the US on 9/11 into a massive defeat, abandoned massive airbases, and $90 billion in advanced weaponry without a fight! That is the beginning of American decline for you.

Biden’s soft socialism would extend federal entitlements to an additional 21 million – the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ’s Great Society. More than half of working-age households would be on the dole, in one form or another. This includes 80% of single parents and 57% of couples with children. New programs will include free community college tuition for families earning 1.5 times the median income, all day-care expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5, a cap on rents based on income, and let’s not forget Medicaid for All. Is that increasing wealth or increasing dependence?

In education, employment, everywhere the vote bak politics is making grades. The “diversity rationale,” decides the selection of students and faculty in Universities, which in turn has given rise to a vast, lucrative “diversity industry.” This industry is now firmly established, at many mid-level universities like UC Davis, and its machinations reach the level of high art as you approach the very top of the ladder - not only at colleges like Harvard but also at crème-de-la-crème enterprises of all kinds, from the New York Times to Goldman Sachs to Google, where the job of diversity experts is to provide exactly the right amount and the right type of “diversity” to suit those institutions’ essentially - indeed, fiercely - exclusionary subcultures. There are diversity consultants to mix in just enough of a token sprinkling of underqualified blacks and Latinos to keep these places from looking like apartheid-era Sun City, South Africa, as well as to make the privileged white core look open-minded.

But Asians? Among the competing victimhoods of Blacks, Hispanics and other, Asians, who come to the US for higher education, research, etc, and rise are as undesirable as the Whites! Kenny Xu records in his definitive new book ‘An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy’, an Asian student wanting to get into Harvard in 2009 (and the injustice certainly hasn’t disappeared since then) “had to score an astounding 450 points higher on a 1600-point SAT test than a Black student to have the same chance of admission.” I forget it now, they have even a new description for Asians linking them to the White oppressors!