If someone has been talking to you lately about the magic mantras of "small government, big society", "government is the biggest problem", "trickle-down economics", etc., you can go back straight:
Wake up! Your grandfather's tablet was lifted.
Just kidding, because today we're going to talk about a more serious issue.
Recently, IN RECENT SPEECHES, US PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN HAS SUDDENLY FREQUENTLY PREACHED "BIG GOVERNMENT" AND DENOUED "SMALL GOVERNMENT" IN MANY SPEECHES RECENTLY.
Big government refers to the government that pursues interventionist policies, which means economic management and social control. In the eyes of today's Americans, this is the "taste of dictatorship" at first hearing, and it is the road that China has taken.
Correspondingly, proponents of small government argue that the smaller the government, the better, at most a night watchman, a community guard, which is the right way in the United States.
But in his April 28 congressional speech, Biden abruptly cited many of America's economic gains, saying that they were "something that only the government can do, and specifically criticizing the "neoliberalism" that favors small government.
This statement shocked many Americans, because neoliberalism is the fundamental line that has dominated the political and economic policies of the United States in the past four decades, mainly anti-nationalism, advocating individual freedom, opposing social welfare, and advocating individual gun ownership.
Beginning with the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the United States embraced neoliberalism and promoted the idea of small government. Don't say that it is Reagan and Bush of the Republican Party, or Clinton of the Democratic Party, I dare not say that my set is not neoliberal.
Obama is so popular that he tries to challenge this ancestral system with medical reform, and the end is to become a lame president.
"Neoliberalism" has also cultivated the well-known mindset of several generations in China, which assumes that government equals absolute evil, that private freedom is great, that no government is the best government, and so on.
Through this ideological infiltration, the United States successfully dismantled the strong governments of many countries after the Cold War and replaced them with a "small government system" that allowed the lifeblood of the national economy to be slaughtered.
Unexpectedly, forty years later, when the Democratic Party, which obviously loves dog food the most, came to power, Biden actually directly contradicted the forty-year-old foreigners, saying that the government is not only the organizing principle of the country's democracy, but also the engine of economic growth and social well-being.
Why? Because Biden found that the United States "pretended" small government, it really could not fit.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="33" >1, "big government" decline</h1>
In 1974, the results of the Nobel Prize in Economics went ahead.
Two men, Hayek and Gunnar Muirdal, one on the right and one on the left, won the prize at the same time.
At that time, many people lost their jaws, first, because Hayek had not studied economics for a long time and ran to engage in politics and philosophy, and second, Murdal and Hayek were on the same page.
Murdal has always held high the banner of the "left" and advocated social equality, while Hayek advocated free competition and opposed government interference in social distribution.
Many readers may not be clear about Hayek. But one of his books is famous, and even if you don't know it, you can understand his position when you hear the title, "The Road to Slavery."
The main meaning of the book is to worry about the growing trend of government in the world after World War II, to oppose state intervention in economic and social life, and to believe that the consequence of the growing government under "nationalism" is the complete enslavement of the people.
Hayek admired classical liberalism, the era when Europeans colonized the globe in the name of free trade. In Hayek's ideal, classical liberalism is the foundation of Western civilization, and that kind of freedom guaranteed by institutions is the direction of human progress.
This theory sounds quite idealistic, but it goes to the extreme, except for the bottom line of guaranteeing freedom, no matter what it does, the bigger the government, the more evil it is.
As a young man, Hayek was reckless, and in 1932, at the age of 33, he had a debate with the prestigious Keynes in the Times, strongly opposing government-funded public works to secure jobs and the economy.
Keynes mercilessly criticized Hayek, saying his ideas were a "gibberish of gibberish" and "garbage."
Later history punched Hayek in the face more than Keynes's criticism.
Roosevelt in the United States engaged in the New Deal, and Britain gave up free trade, and both finally came out of the shadows through large-scale intervention in the economy. Keynesianism and large-scale intervention in the economy of big government became the main policy guidelines for countries after World War II.
So, until he won the Nobel Prize, Hayek, along with the Austrian school to which he belonged, remained depressed until the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1974.
Because there was a political wave of anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-government intervention in the economy, supported by big capital, that pushed Hayek onto the podium. The Nobel Committee, which could not reject Hayek, put a leftist scholar in power to hedge the political risks.
The representative of this political wave is the British "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher read Hayek's writings as a young man, and after entering politics, he regarded Hayek as a mentor.
In Britain at the time, the economy stagnated and the government was incapacitated. When the British Conservative Party discussed the need to take the pragmatist middle line and avoid being left or right, Thatcher, who had just been elected chairman of the party, directly pulled out a book:
At first glance, hayek's Freedom Charter.
As a result, Hayek's popularity in Britain began to rise, and with Thatcher's election as prime minister in 1979, his prestige rose sharply.
Under the influence of Hayek's neoliberal ideas, Thatcher promoted small government, cutting taxes for the rich, cutting public spending and social welfare. Politically, Britain took the right-wing hawkish route, expeditioned to the Falklands, beat the Argentines to tears, and revived british national confidence.
As a result, in the 1980s, the British economy continued to improve and came out of stagnation, but at the cost of a sharper divide between rich and poor.
Hayek rose to fame in Britain, and Conservatives in the United States finally found the treasure.
Since the 1930s, Roosevelt Jr. first took care of the economy, won World War II, and also served four terms of service and died in the presidency, with full prestige, and also allowed Keynesianism to rule American politics for forty years.
The most depressed were, of course, the traditional far-right conservatives, and even Nixon, who started out as an anti-communist, called himself a "Keynesian."
At this time, the British political arena first blew the neoliberal horn led by Hayek, and American conservatives and big capital were naturally overjoyed and immediately touted Hayek.
Reagan had studied Hayek as early as the '60s and naturally seized on this wave of "neoliberal" political winds to emerge from the party.
For example, Reagan famously said that is still enshrined as a hadith by liberals : "Government is not the solution to the problem, the government is the problem."
Coupled with the fact that the Americans also lost confidence in the Carter administration because of the stagnation and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Reagan ascended to the throne in 1980 under favorable conditions, reversing the "Keynesianism" that had long dominated American politics and carrying the banner of small government.
Later history was that the United States under Reagan survived the Soviet Union and seized the opportunity to promote "neoliberalism" around the world.
In 1989, the top echelons of the United States, the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department devised a "Washington Consensus" that designed a set of neoliberal political and economic theories for other countries.
The "Washington Consensus" mainly includes ten major aspects, such as reducing the fiscal deficit, attaching importance to infrastructure, reducing marginal tax rates, marketization of interest rates, loosening the exchange rate system, trade liberalization, relaxing restrictions on foreign investment, and privatization of state-owned enterprises.
Along this road, Russia, Argentina, Turkey, Greece, Southeast Asia, Egypt and a series of other countries, almost even China, have been brought into the pit of "small government" and slashed by the United States with financial and political advantages.
Let others engage in small government, but is the US government under neoliberalism really "small"?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="267" >2, the larger "small government."</h1>
One day in 1984, Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was summoned to the library in a corner of the White House.
He went in to find Reagan sitting without saying a word, but his men said to Volcker:
The President has ordered you, before the election, not to raise interest rates!
This sentence shocked the Fed chairman, because the Fed was not under the direct leadership of the White House, but Reagan loudly and directly issued orders for him to cooperate with political operations.
In the past, the presidents of the "big government" era rarely intervened in the Fed, but Reagan, who was known as "small government", wanted more than anyone to control the Fed, and then control the fate of the United States and even the world's finances.
Why?
Because small neoliberal governments must tell the public that they can solve the gap between rich and poor in order to gain universal support. In order to persuade the people to accept that the national policy prioritizes the rich, such as tax cuts, Reagan used his talent for acting and vigorously promoted a set of "Reagan economics".
He believes that the government should not help the poor, should not deliberately manage the division between the rich and the poor, but should increase the total wealth through economic growth, and ultimately benefit the poor and make the economy prosperous.
"Give all the money to the rich at the top, and drop by drop it will flow into the hands of the poor."
This theory has been derided by economists well versed in the "Matthew effect" as a "trickle-down effect."
And this theory, the most critical, is who masters the faucet, how to control the irrigation.
So Reagan had to grab hold of the Fed, grab hold of finance, and actually let finance control the whole country.
The American philosopher David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wrote:
"Neoliberalization is the financialization of everything. This process has given finance control not only over all other sectors of the economy, but also over the state apparatus and everyday life. ”
Like Thatcher, Reagan's eight years in office brought a series of evil consequences, in addition to the superficial bubble boom brought about by financialization and the development of capital-intensive industries such as computer information technology:
The top tax rate for the wealthy in the United States has been reduced from 70% to 28%, and there has been an inversion of tax rates and incomes;
Government deficits are getting higher and higher, military spending is soaring, but welfare levels are getting lower and lower;
The economy is derelict, the industrial outflow is serious, and the trade deficit is difficult to reverse;
The gap between the rich and the poor is widening, but the winds of speculation on Wall Street are becoming more and more fierce, masking the winds of autumn in other industries.
Without the support of the real economy, the more the Fed's water is released, the more it cannot withstand the collapse of the fundamentals, and it can only try its best to suppress other countries' currencies to ensure the stable position of the US dollar.
The trade deficit and fiscal deficit also forced the Reagan administration into a corner, so it was both soft and hard, forcing Japan and Germany to sign the "Plaza Accord."
It is not enough to have the hegemony of the us dollar, because the competitiveness of the real economy is still not supported. Therefore, the Reagan administration simply went down to the scene itself, launched a trade war against Japan, directly killed Toshiba, and strangled japan's electronic information industry.
Years later, the same trick was repeated, and Alstom, France, became a ghost under the knife.
Today, the same pressure has come to Huawei, tiktok and other Chinese companies.
In the name of "small government", the US government's means of interfering in the free market have become darker and darker, and it has completely embarked on the crooked road of not being able to fight, robbing if it can't be played, and printing when it has less money.
(Forty years, federal interest rates have been falling.)
Correspondingly, so-called "small government" budgets are getting higher and higher, not smaller, but not for the well-being of the people, but to ensure that financial groups, the tech elite, and the military-industrial complex are expanding unchecked, with lower interest rates and a widening gap between the rich and the poor.
One of the largest and most extravagant governments ever built by mankind has emerged under the mask of "small government."
In 2020, under the impact of the epidemic, the United States has carried out three consecutive large-scale relief, but it is still unable to reverse the economy, so there is Biden's criticism of "small government".
Because all the monetary tools of the Fed have been used, and the policy ammunition has been exhausted, it means that the neoliberal small government's set of money-making methods has been exhausted, and it is necessary to use the financial means of the big government to print money and issue money in a different posture.
So Biden simply tore the skin of "small government" completely.
Regardless of whether you are big or small, don't you just print money in a different way?
On May 28, Biden submitted a draft fiscal year 2022 budget totaling $6 trillion to Congress, applying for an expansion of government spending in areas such as infrastructure, education, and combating climate change.
Not only has the absolute figure set a historic record, higher than Japan's GDP, but the deficit alone is owed to the next Brazilian GDP, which can be said to be all over the sky.
According to the approximate proportion of the budgets of the US federal and state and local governments in 2019, it can be roughly predicted that the total fiscal budget of all levels of government in the United States will reach 11.3 trillion US dollars in 2022.
At that time, the US GDP will only be 22 trillion US dollars, and the proportion of the entire fiscal expenditure will account for more than 50% of GDP! That means that more than half of the entire U.S. economy is directly controlled by the government, not to mention indirectly.
In contrast, in 2020, China's fiscal expenditure accounted for about 24% of GDP, even in 1978 China was only 30%, that is, the Soviet Union, which played the "planned economy" to the extreme, did not reach the scale and proportion of fiscal expenditure of the US government today.
Biden is only going to engage in "big government" and is directly running to the planned economy!
This wave, this wave of eagle sauce hair was stripped by the rabbit, and turned to touch the old bear's ass.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="268" >3, dinner for a few</h1>
The "Sovietization" of the United States, according to Biden, is all China's fault.
The Biden administration revived the old yellow calendar of "big government" for three main reasons:
First of all, in the past few decades, China's economic development model with government macro-control as the core has been more dynamic than the laissez-faire United States, and for the first time, the United States has been weak about its own economic advantages.
Secondly, during the epidemic period, the United States political anti-epidemic and anti-China priority, resulting in chaos from the federal to the state government, until the virus spreads, and now Biden, who has come up to wipe his ass, must fully intervene in the prevention and control of the epidemic in the country.
Finally, the US economy has not improved after several major water releases, China's recovery has been in the dust, and the Biden administration can only turn over the old yellow calendar of Roosevelt's New Deal decades ago, ready to engage in big infrastructure and big stimulus.
In short, "we must prove that democracy is still valid" (Biden).
How can this sound so weak-hearted?
Because Biden knows better than anyone that today's America, guided by Hayek's utopian neoliberalism, has become more and more like the totalitarian state described by the left-wing writer Orwell in his novel "1984" in 1984.
What the??? You say democratic elections are not totalitarian countries? The Nazis understood thanks.
At that time, Orwell's fictional Oceania, although alluding to the Soviet Union under Stalin, today, is completely in line with the portrayal of the United States.
Oceania government agencies are divided into four departments, each corresponding to the interlocking interest groups in the United States today:
The Ministry of Peace is responsible for armaments and war – corresponding to the military-industrial complex, a huge interest group composed of the military, the military industry enterprise and some members of Parliament, waging wars around the world, exporting weapons, sending other countries to lose money, and escorting other departments.
The Department of Fraternity is responsible for maintaining order, repression, and torture—corresponding to the United States' legal complex of police, lawyers, intelligence agents, and the judiciary. The police are responsible for shooting and suppressing, executing thousands of people in the streets every year, detaining millions of people across the country, lawyers responsible for taking money to whitewash the peace, and the judiciary protecting the rich from always being in a dominant position, and extending their tentacles to the whole world, and the ability to monitor and subvert.
The Ministry of Truth is responsible for propaganda, culture, education, and falsification of history - corresponding to the United States with Hollywood as the core, YTB, TT, FB as the platform, CNN and other fake news as thugs, as well as the "cognitive combat complex" of miscellaneous military strategies such as public knowledge in various countries, appeasing the inside, slandering the outside, and smearing the false image of the United States.
The rich ministry is responsible for production and distribution - corresponding to the dollar financial system with the Federal Reserve and Wall Street as the core, never caring about the value creation of the real economy, relying on creating bubbles in the world, exporting inflation, creating poverty externally, tearing apart the rich and the poor internally, and harvesting the hard-earned wealth of other countries and feeding back the other three sectors.
The Ministry of Peace is a thug, the Ministry of Friendship pulls accomplices, the Ministry of Truth plays blindfolds, and the Ministry of Wealth directly robs money, which is bound together by the chain of interests and cooperates with the "bandit group" that seems to be a closed loop of logic, but in fact it has entered a vortex of death.
In 2014, Greece, fooled by neoliberalism and struggling with the quagmire of debt, launched a satirical and extremely poignant work, "Dinner for a Few".
The film tells the story of a stormy and dilapidated building in the dark sea. The room in the building was golden, and several pigs, dressed in Chinese costumes, sat around a large dining table, and the chains of interests under their feet bound them to death.
Pig heads represent politicians, judges, merchants, bankers, religious leaders, and so on. A chef is responsible for cooking and serving, and a group of kittens represent a hungry people.
Every time it was time for dinner, the chef would tear apart the things in the house and put them into a machine to make a large meal and bring it to the table. The fat pig heads greedily scavenged for food, and only a little scrap of leftovers fell to the ground, causing hungry civilians to kill each other.
Finally, the room was surrounded by walls, the furniture walls were swallowed up by a few pig heads, and the civilians were angry, turned into white tigers, jumped on the table, bit all the pig heads, ate meat and drank blood, and slept on a messy dining table.
But this is not the end, and the kittens that finally emerge from the tiger's belly have transformed into a new generation of pig-headed people.
Under capitalism, the so-called changes and changes bring not hope, but eternal reincarnation, until the edifice collapses.
Whether big or small, if generations of revolutionaries, reformers, and victorious rulers are not prevented from becoming greedy complexes of interests, this vicious circle will continue forever.
From the period of the Great Revolution to the founding of New China, from the planned economy to the socialist market economy, China has gone through storms and storms, carried out rectification, reform, and anti-corruption that do not know how many times it has penetrated deep into the bone marrow, in exchange for today's achievements, but it still feels a lot of pressure, and does not dare to slacken off a little about this eternal problem of thousands of years.
Today, Biden wants to engage in big government, and the real purpose is not for the real well-being of the American people, but for the purpose of maintaining US hegemony by defeating China and proving the superiority of so-called "democracy".
In this way, the pig heads, hereditary legislators, and the president's family can continue to sit firmly in the name of "liberal democracy."
Whether it is the neoliberalism of the Republican Party or the laissez-faire liberalism of the Democratic Party, no matter what form of government, it does not fight corruption and eliminate the sores, and allows vested interest groups to erode the foundation of the country, which will inevitably drag the country and the people into the abyss prepared by the minority for the majority.
This is precisely what Hayek fears most in The Road to Slavery.
Don't forget, Hitler also forcibly came to power with the actual support of the junker aristocratic landlords, monopolized state power under the situation of currency and economic collapse, and frantically engaged in infrastructure construction and budget smashing.
Big government and the like, although the Democratic Party Biden engages, the Republican Party will only get a bigger follow-up card, you come and go, maybe not far from the "Nazis".
Resources:
Evan Yin: America's Turn – From "Small Government" to "Big Government"
Ba Shu Song explains "The Road to Slavery"