China and the US: Cohesiveness VS Divisiveness
by John Lawrence, August 7, 2019
Obama famously said, "We are not the blue states of America and the red states of America. We are the United States of America." I'm sorry Mr. Obama, but you are wrong, wrong, wrong. We are the Disunited States of America. China, on the other hand, moves forward seemingly with one unified agenda and with one voice. Maybe that's because they're a one party state. Maybe that's because they've cultivated and nurtured a unified people. Maybe because they're followers of Confucius. Maybe it's because they don't tolerate any dissension. I don't know. All I know is whatever they're doing, it's working. Meanwhile, the US political system is in gridlock.
Many of the problems inherent in the US today are solvable if the country and its leaders spoke with one mind. But the two party system has created a broad chasm and has led to gridlock. Take immigration policy for example. There is just no agreement because each party has its own agenda. There is no unification. There is such a thing as a rational immigration party on which a majority of the people could agree. But the leaders of the Republican party don't want a rational immigration policy. They want to leave the whole subject of immigration up in the air so they can make political hay out of it. It serves their interests not to solve the problem of immigration.
As one element of immigration policy that both parties could agree upon, let's take border security. Most people would agree that a secure border is desirable. A secure border is certainly possible with not even state of the art technology. The border could be secured with the technology found in most present day cars - radars and cameras. So why aren't they doing it? Answer is simple: there's no money in it. It would seem that the primary responsibility of the military would be to protect the nation's borders. However, the Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law signed on June 18, 1878, by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The purpose of the act – in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 – is to limit the powers of the federal government in using federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. It has been interpreted as removing the Army and Air Force from any responsibility of protecting US borders, but my interpretation is that this was not the original intent of the act.
The military doesn't want to be involved with protecting the borders because it could be done so cheaply and with a very limited (but substantially increased) number of personnel. No the military is about multibillion dollar aircraft carriers and multibillion dollar airplanes. The USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier costs more than $13 billion and that's just to build it, not to maintain it. Here's an example of how the US and China do business. Each has developed an advanced aircraft with similar capabilities. The American F-22 production was axed because of its high cost - US$62 billion for the whole project, which equates to US $339 million per aircraft. The Chinese J-20's research and development cost was estimated to be more than 30 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion), with a cost per aircraft of US$100-110 million. So the US accomplished its goal of spending multiples of billions of dollars and then scrapping the airplane. China's costs were much cheaper and they actually have an advanced airplane at their disposal.
So border security would be a trivially expensive problem to solve if the military actually did their job and protected the borders but .. it's not their job, man. Their job is to spend billions and billions of dollars on advanced weaponry whether or not it is ever fully functional. Meanwhile, Republicans have a political football they can toss around and work up the racists. Solving the immigration problem would deprive them of that.
So freedom has produced gridlock and Chinese philosophy has produced a society that moves forward with more or less one voice and one agenda. One of Confucius' teachings was a variant of the Golden Rule, sometimes called the "Silver Rule" owing to its negative form: "What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others." Confucius's moral system was based upon empathy and understanding others, rather than divinely ordained rules. Confucius asserts that virtue is a mean between extremes. For example, the properly generous person gives the right amount—not too much and not too little. While the Chinese have adopted a superior variant of capitalism, they remain politically a one party system, a one philosophy system. They have free elections at the local level, and then those leaders select the leaders at the next higher level and so on. The US political system had gotten us to the point where no problem is solvable not because it's inherently unsolvable but because our political leaders in one party, namely the Republican party, are in a position to block any solutions, and it is in their political interests to do so.
Freedom has culminated in gridlock, and an unlimited Second Amendment has culminated in mass shootings. I don't think China would tolerate these outcomes. Instead they are moving ahead with their Belt and Road Initiative peacefully building infrastructure throughout the world at the same time that the US is trying to control the world with its outsized military and the threat of sanctions. The US threatens a country's economic development by the use of sanctions; China is ameliorating economic development by building infrastructure around the world. Which country has the more humane policies?
