David Frum's Flaccid Apologetics For Niall Ferguson

     Frum in recent years has called out much of his own conservative movement. He seems to feel that Niall deserves to be defended by his unprofessional hit piece on the front page of Newsweek.

     However, in reading Frum's piece, if this is the best that can be done in Niall's defense, it doesn't bode well for him.

    Frum lasers in on one aspect of Ferguson's shoddy piece, the part where he attacks the President for being soft on China.

    What has been notable in Romney's attacks on the President's foreign policy and China issues, is that there is very little substance in it, it's mostly just nitpicking. Here is Frum's attempt to claim Niall's worries over China somehow surpassing has validity. Ferguson actually claimed that China would surpass us by 2017 in GDP.

    "Many commentators have shrugged off this projection. China has four times more people than the U.S., so even if they only attain one-fourth the per-capita output of Americans, it is inevitable China must overtake the U.S. Nothing to be done about it, therefore nothing to worry about, therefore shocking bad form for Ferguson to raise the point at all."

    "I dissent."

    "If living standards mattered most, then Denmark would be a superpower. A China that becomes richer in aggregate than the U.S. will exert new global sway—and make this planet a less congenial place for those who cherish liberal democratic values."

   "Fortunately, things are not yet quite so dire as Ferguson fears. His chart does not specify, but he's comparing Chinese to U.S. GDP not at market prices but using instead with currencies adjusted for purchasing power parity. The purchasing power parity measure has its valid uses, but for comparing two countries' international throw weight, you want to know what they can buy on global markets. By that measure, China cannot overtake the U.S. until at least pretty deep in the 2020s."

    "Still, Ferguson's polemical point is the true one. The prospect of the U.S. as number 2 is a threat and challenge. So long as China remains a repressive authoritarian oligarchy, the prospect of a world reordered to meet Chinese imperatives is an ugly one. If the outcome cannot wholly be averted, postponing it for another generation ought to be a supreme task for national policy making. And shrugging off Ferguson's grim warning with self assurances about higher U.S. consumer welfare utterly misses the mark: those who have power can take wealth from those who possess wealth, but lose power."

       http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/china.html

      Note how superficial it is for Frum to claim that Niall's "polemical point is the true one." Is it true that we are going to be number 2 to China by 2017? I find that fairly unlikely. Then there is the question of how you define becoming number 2. I don't really get Frum's dismissal of the question of living standards.

       How exactly is President Obama supposed to magically wave a wand and give us four times as many people as China? Ironically while there is no way, it would be helpful if the flat earthers in Frum's own party-like Mitt Romney-would stop trying to block immigration. The latest Tea Party phenom, Ted Cruz, actually not only wants to crackdown on illegal immigration but reduce legal immigration to the country.

       Then again, I'm far from persuaded of Frum's claim that if China were to surpass us in one measure of GDP this would mean the world was now unsafe for liberal democracy.

       For all this there is too much worrying about China in a sense; it's easy to forget that there was a time that Japan was growing by leaps and bounds and used to grow by 12, 14, or even 16% every quarter.

       In 1972 they grew by 16%, then we had the Nixon Surprise, and the oil shock and in 1973 they grew by 3% and never got near double digits again.

       The nub of it though is what does Ferguson-Romney actually propose? Is this about anything more than just political nitpicking.