Dana H.

China's Well-Prepared; We're Not

"There is simply no way five billion people can enjoy the lifestyle of today's average New Yorker – unless we somehow discover a few more resource-rich planets we can cheaply exploit."

This, and the statement that wind is the "cheapest and easiest" form of alternative energy, are the statements of a scientific and historical illiterate. There is no intrinsic shortage of natural resources. The limits on their present and future availability are purely political -- restrictions on drilling, on oil shale exploitation, on nuclear power plants, on mining, on carbon emissions, and so on. And on the other side of the political coin, massive subsidies wasted on wind and solar boondoggles that suck investment capital away from better uses.

We don't need to hoard natural resources (as China is allegedly doing). We simply need to free them. More precisely, we need to free the businessmen and engineers who would exploit them if allowed to.

Roubini's Forecasts for Asia Recovery Are Flawed

Actually, an inability to encourage the destruction of savings (which is what people mean when they speak of "encouraging domestic consumption") would be bullish for China. The Keynesian notion that a country increases its wealth by consumption, or that you can spend your way out of a recession, reverses cause and effect.

It is savings and investment, not spending and consumption, that is the engine of a country's growth. So the irony might be that the entrenched defenders of the status quo will save the "reformers" from themselves. (Of course, I am exaggerating here, as I'm sure there are numerous restrictions and regulations in China that *should* be removed in order to encourage prosperity. I am speaking here only of the issue of savings versus consumption.)