John Derbyshire: China, then and now

John Derbyshire writes:

He even fails to note some things the ChiComs are getting right that we are getting wrong. They may face demographic decline, but they are facing it when technological progress makes ever-swelling populations pointless. And they are attending to population quality while we, in our folly, are importing masses of future “useless mouths.”

No, I don’t think the CCP offers any kind of model for the future, even for China’s future. I do, though, with a grudging nod to Eric Li, think their Staatskunstwunder might prompt us to think more critically about our own problems. If authoritarian rule by technocratic clones with Swiss bank accounts is not the way of the future, neither is universal-suffrage democracy.

Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.

Tomorrow’s politics will be the art of providing make-work for as many as possible of the employable minority while pacifying the un-employable majority with a state dole. In that world, universal-suffrage democracy will be untenable.