Sid Webb (@BearoftheSouth)

@[email protected] (Part 2 of 3) LOL.........You sound like AOC........HERE is the TRUTH......... MITI was not like a communist central planning authority, but rather created a general roadmap for private industry to follow.  For example, if the five-year plan called for doubling the number of highways in Japan, MITI would make sure the car companies were given whatever help they needed to build enough cars to fill the new roads. MITI was not like a communist central planning authority, but rather created a general roadmap for private industry to follow. For example, if the five-year plan called for doubling the number of highways in Japan, MITI would make sure the car companies were given whatever help they needed to build enough cars to fill the new roads. The main point of this whole system was that the country as a whole had a sense of direction and an overall plan for the future.  This made it easier for companies and individuals to plan their own futures. Despite its incredible success, the Japanese system had a major flaw.  This was caused by a system of … … forced retirement of bureaucrats.  Any bureaucrat who did not make it past a certain level of promotion was forced to retire early.  These bureaucrats would then take a “golden parachute” and land jobs in the private sectors that they formerly had supervised.  This created what was in effect a system of deferred bribery.  Bureaucrats would offer sweetheart deals to corporations in exchange for a promise of a lucrative job after their retirement.  Very low pay for bureaucrats only made the system worse. Singapore solved this problem by not forcing bureaucrats to retire, and paying them salaries that were competitive with the private sector.  This meant they could concentrate on the greater good, not simply the good of whomever it was they were supposed to supervise. Overall, the Singaporean and Japanese models combined the best of Western capitalism and East Asian Confucian meritocratic bureaucracy.  Other countries like South Korea, China, and Vietnam copied their examples.  The overall result was for Asia as a whole to have a larger GDP than the West as a whole. This fundamental change in the balance of economic power led to Asian countries demanding more of a say in how the planet as a whole is run.  Unless the West reforms its systems by incorporating and improving on the successful parts of the Asian model, the more time that passes, the stronger Asia will become as the West becomes weaker. Now let us examine the failure of the Western system, especially after the end of the Cold War. The West experienced massive economic expansion as a result of World War II. This was because of industrial planning related to the war effort. When World War II ended, the original impetus in the West was to dismantle the military apparatus and bring it back down to traditional and minimal peacetime levels.