The prevailing wisdom is that politics, along with its economic offshoots, has to be amoral to be successful. Some call it healthy cynicism, others prefer the 19th century German term Realpolitik.
Whatever it’s called, this belief is wrong. As often as not, the most moral course of action is also the most practical.
For example, it would have taken no more than police action for the West to stamp out Russian Bolshevism at any time between 1917 and 1922.
That hygienic operation would have rid the world of its most dangerous contagion, making the action moral.
And in practical terms, it would have saved not only the millions of lives, but also the trillions in whatever currency you care to name it took to fight the resulting pandemic over the next 70-odd years (a fight, incidentally, that’s far from over).
Similarly it would have been both moral and practical for the West to kill Nazism before it killed millions. This would have amounted to a cakewalk at any time between the 1936 remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the 1939 capitulation of Poland.
In 1936 the Nazis were bluffing: the Wehrmacht was then weak and far from the efficient machine it went on to become later.
And in 1939 it was still so much under strength that the attack on Poland sapped Germany’s resources – so much so that the Nazis couldn’t afford to keep a single tank on their Western border.
By contrast France alone, even without the British Expeditionary Corps, had over 1,800 tanks poised on Germany’s border. That force could have rolled all the way to Berlin practically unopposed – but didn’t. We all know what happened next.
Yet what provoked my thoughts about practical morality was matters economic, not martial. Specifically, the current troubles of China’s economy, threatening a global economic catastrophe.
The USA, along with the rest of the West, has been happy to ‘outsource’ production to China, whose population is consigned to what only Protagorean sophistry would prevent one from calling slave labour.
We choose not to ponder the ethical implications. Yet if we were to add up the cost of raw materials, utility prices, depreciation of the factory plant, manufacturer’s mark-up, cuts taken off the top by various middlemen and retailers, cost of transportation and storage, customs duties etc., we’d realise that the poor devils who make the cheap products we enjoy still subsist on a bowl of rice a day.
However, before amalgamating China into the global economy, wherein the collapse of a large part might destroy all, we would have done well to remember that slave economies aren’t just immoral but also moribund.
At the slow-moving time of Egypt or Rome it took millennia for the slave-drivers to come to a sticky end. When the pace of life quickened, slave economies could hang on for a century or two (Britain’s American colonies, especially the southernmost ones), almost a century (the USSR), or a couple of decades (China).
But sooner or later they do a Jericho and come tumbling down. And if they are as massive as China’s they may well bury us all under the rubble.
Such is the economic history. And if you look for its current validation, you need to look no further than China.
Most indicators suggest that, to mix the metaphorical clichés just for the fun of it, the bubble has burst and the chickens have come home to roost.
For the last several years, the Chinese have been pumping massive borrowing into the corporate sector, mostly construction. A high-rise town after town has been going up, with most of them becoming ghost towns due to lack of demand.
Predictably last month the Chinese market crashed, wiping trillions off the economy already margined to breaking point and moaning under the weight of rapidly multiplying derivatives.
In response the Chinese declared they were abandoning their export-based economic model. Then they belied their declaration by unpegging the yuan from the dollar and thrice devaluing it this week.
Such measures usually point at a desperate attempt to lower unit costs even further and make exports even cheaper – this against the background of rapidly declining Chinese exports.
In a parallel development China has cut her interest rates by 1.25% to a record low. This, as most economists (including those in China) agree, is way too excessive and evidently desperate.
The communists also lie about their annual growth rate or, to be charitable, fail to measure it properly. They claim a current figure of 7%, but in reality it’s closer to 3%. This would be respectable for most Western economies, and unachievable for the EU, but for China it represents a massive slowdown from almost 15% a decade ago.
The signs are that China is incapable of managing the slowdown properly – and that, unlike her communist, slave-owning government, solid economic theory doesn’t lie. The danger is that the slowdown could turn into a meltdown, putting us all at deadly risk.
Hence a principled refusal to admit communist China into a global economy would have been both practical and moral – and Realpolitik be damned.