John Fenn on why the Chinese have Americans flummoxed

Q: What has China done to the USA for the USA to be tough with it? 

A: The Chinese have done a number of things wrong.  This has really gotten the Americans totally flummoxed. 

1. They have been wildly successful in bringing EVERYBODY out of poverty.
2. They care about EVERYBODY. All of them.
3. The will no longer kowtow to the US, nor anybody else.
4. They have developed non dollar trading mediums.
5. They have circumvented US hegemony.
6. They have developed their own allies.
7. They have pursued win win economic policy with their neighbours.
8. They have signed up half the world into the Belt and Road trading group.
9. They have stayed in their borders.
10. They are too big to attack.
11. They provide the chain of supply for the US government and military

And thanks to Felix Su :- Last but not least. They’re doing Capitalism better than the US.  That isn’t allowed.  How dare those Chinese go from Communism to Capitalism and beat the US in 50 years! 

I could go on but ALL of these things are anathema to the Ferengi.  The US hate success in others, especially when they cannot get a piece of the action.  The US prefers a zero sum game.  I win, You Lose. 

The United States regards business as WAR, to be won at all costs.  Much of this they will claim they got from a book called “The Art of War” by a Chinese scholar named Sun Tzu.  Because of the belief the Ferenghi really cannot tell the difference between a competitor and an enemy.

~ John Fenn, Quora answer, September 15, 2021

Kevin Duffy on taxing the wealthy

There's a glaring defect with "tax the uber-rich:" capitalism is a positive sum game while taxation is a zero sum game.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, December 28, 2021

Kevin Duffy on the left-right political spectrum

The world to left and right is similar: zero sum. Everywhere someone is screwing someone. With the left it's capitalists screwing workers. With the right it's Chinese businesses screwing Americans.

We need someone to talk about the positive sum real world... aka a libertarian.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, August 14, 2020

Ben Shapiro on the progressive worldview of wealth, inequality, virtue and evil

No one is a better person just because they're poor.  By the way, no one's a better person because they're rich.  All that wealth is is a measure of voluntary exchanges you engaged in in a free market.  That's all that wealth is.  But the idea for the Left is that all inequality is evil, therefore the people who are unequal at the top are evil and the people at the bottom are virtuous.  Which is why you'll hear people on the Left say things like they like small business, but they hate people who are big business like the Wal-Mart family, the Walton family.  They're terrible.  Well were they terrible when they were just a family living in the middle of nowhere?  When exactly did they transition over into evil?  When they became successful enough.  Because their success meant, by necessity, according to the leftist worldview, they were depriving others of their fair share.

~ Ben Shapiro, "Ben Shapiro EDUCATES College Professors in an Epic Q & A," YouTube, 18:38 mark, before 2016 presidential election (posted July 24, 2019)

Henry Paulson on the trade war with China

It should concern every one of us who cares about the state of the global economy that the positive-sum metaphors of healthy economic competition are giving way to zero-sum metaphors of military competition.

~ Henry Paulson, former Treasury Secretary, in a speech in Beijing

(as cited in the November 25, 2019 print version of Barron's)

Karl Marx on wealth creation

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

~ Karl Marx

John Bogle sees investment management as a zero sum game

In the debate about the fiduciary rule, one basic fact has been largely ignored. Investment wealth is created by our public corporations and reflected in stock prices. Stock market returns are then allocated between the financial industry (Wall Street) and shareholders (Main Street). So when the consulting firm A.T. Kearney projected that the fiduciary rule would result in as much as $20 billion in lost revenue for the industry by 2020, it meant that net investment returns for investors would increase by $20 billion.

By any definition, that’s a social good.

~ John Bogle, "Putting Clients Second," The New York Times, February 9, 2017

Julian Simon on wealth creation

Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth.  And when a person does not understand the creation of resources and wealth, the only intellectual alternative is to believe that increasing wealth must be at the cost of someone else.  This belief that our good fortune must be an exploitation of others may be the taproot of false prophecy about doom that our evil ways must bring upon us.

~ Julian Simon