Why look to the West?
The excellent article by Will Hutton (“Davos is an example of the worst failures of Western capitalism,” Jan. 22, page 9) is a warning to all thriving economies like Taiwan that have an unseen ace card which they should treasure above all else.
The West does not have a system of true capitalism, which is based on the premise that evolution, supply and demand are interdependent.
Think of a population of foxes and rabbits: If there are no foxes, then the rabbit population flips into the exponential function, leading to numerical suicide.
This is the same problem that people and bacteria face: You reproduce in such numbers that you eventually kill the host.
Capitalism is supposed to be ruthless, like nature, and anything that becomes unviable ends up extinct. If you constantly prop up failure, as in Greece, you break these rules and it does not work.
The most important point about financial transactions is that both parties must be interdependent, they must need each other to exist. If one party becomes too powerful, it will keep taking too much until it destroys the host and itself; banks are the best example.
The universe is based on a principle of interdependent partners, “the principle of complementarity.” This is what gives us the “uncertainty principle.”
Certainty is always based on uncertainty: Classical mechanics arises from quantum mechanics, the accuracy of events in the solar system is provided by chaotic behavior, which needs Hamiltonian equations to describe it (not Newtonian as you might think).
Economies and cultures are just the same, the mathematics able to describe the state of the system as a whole cannot predict individual outcomes, these must remain uncertain. Lots of people making individual choices results in a healthy system.
A successful economy is based on the number of small transactions that take place each day, not the few big ones. This is the ace card that Taiwan has; all the small businesses are still in place, while Europe has swept them all away.
The last time I visited the UK I tried to buy food in a village, but the only shop left was a gasoline station, owned by BP and Tesco. An unhealthy, monopolistic approach to trade. It is this approach that doesn’t work, not capitalism itself.
England’s social security bill is 10 times its military budget. In Taiwan the population looks after itself. So do not look to the West, they would do well to look here to see how it should be done.
Just to prove my point, this same approach leads to cruel and dysfunctional monotheistic religions. Religion here is safe and part of everyday life.
The cruel behavior of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and Ireland are shining examples of stupidity caused by feeding power and wealth up to the top, a pope living in a palace, opulence running down the walls, kissing gold artifacts and telling people what they must do and believe: exactly what he was told by the poor intelligent individual at the beginning not to do.
Jesus Christ, you may not have noticed, was not religious. That is what people do and as collectives they are predictable.
Taiwan’s ace cards means that things are much more natural because they are self-regulating.
Think before you play your hand, the results of social and financial stupidity are in this newspaper, every day, for all to see.
Peter Cook
Greater Taichung
US President Donald Trump last week told reporters that he had signed about 12 letters to US trading partners, which were set to be sent out yesterday, levying unilateral tariff rates of up to 70 percent from Aug. 1. However, Trump did not say which countries the letters would be sent to, nor did he discuss the specific tariff rates, reports said. The news of the tariff letters came as Washington and Hanoi reached a trade deal earlier last week to cut tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the US to 20 percent from 46 percent, making it the first Asian country
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
As things heated up in the Middle East in early June, some in the Pentagon resisted American involvement in the Israel-Iran war because it would divert American attention and resources from the real challenge: China. This was exactly wrong. Rather, bombing Iran was the best thing that could have happened for America’s Asia policy. When it came to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, “all options are on the table” had become an American mantra over the past two decades. But the more often US administration officials insisted that military force was in the cards, the less anyone believed it. After
During an impromptu Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) rally on Tuesday last week to protest what the party called the unfairness of the judicial system, a young TPP supporter said that if Taiwan goes to war, he would “surrender to the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army [PLA] with unyielding determination.” The rally was held after former Taipei deputy mayor Pong Cheng-sheng’s (彭振聲) wife took her life prior to Pong’s appearance in court to testify in the Core Pacific corruption case involving former Taipei mayor and TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). The TPP supporter said President William Lai (賴清德) was leading them to die on
RSS