As we close out 2022, the dollar price of gold is just above $1,800 per ounce. While the gold price has fluctuated a bit, it has actually mostly stayed within a narrow range.

Starting around the beginning of the 21st century, gold went on a bull market run for about 10 years. It has largely been uneventful since that time. There was a short-term bear market in 2015 and 2016. If you had invested in gold around 2011 near its high, you wouldn’t have seen much in the way of gains or losses in terms of U.S. dollars since that time, although the dollar has depreciated quite a bit in that time.

Precious metals, particularly gold and silver, is the only major asset class that isn’t in a bubble. While stocks, real estate, cryptos, and other assets have roared higher for the last several years, the metals haven’t done much.

Bonds are a different story. They are likely in an unsustainable long-term bubble, but they could still do well in 2023 if there is a deep recession and interest rates fall.

The yield curve is highly inverted as we close out the year, and a deep recession looks likely in 2023. This will have a great impact on all asset prices, including gold. It will also depend on the actions taken by central banks, and the Federal Reserve in particular.

We can fully expect that real estate and stocks will go down in 2023. The declines have already begun, and the decline in the Nasdaq has really begun. To be sure, in early 2020 I thought it was crazy that the Nasdaq was going to hit 10,000. I thought it was a bubble then. With the massive sell-off in 2022, the Nasdaq is now slightly above the 10,000 mark.

So the question may not be whether gold will go up in price in 2023. It is more a question of whether it will do better than most other investments, and I think the answer is yes.

In the 2008 financial crisis, gold went down. But it didn’t get hit as hard as stocks and housing, and it went back up rather quickly. The same thing could happen in 2023, especially if and when the Fed reverses course and stops its monetary tightening.

Dollar Strength and the Fed

One of the other factors to consider when looking at the gold price is the relative strength of the U.S. dollar. In 2022, the euro actually fell below the dollar, although it has gained back some of its losses at the end of the year.

But the overall strong dollar (relative to the other major currencies) has been a weakness for gold, at least for Americans. If you look at the gold price in euros, it is much stronger these days and not far off its all-time highs.

Investors are taking the Fed seriously about tightening its monetary policy to get price inflation under control. Of course, the high price inflation is a result of the Fed’s previous policies, but the Fed seems to be the only major central bank that is serious about getting it under control.

Maybe that will all go out the window with a bad recession in 2023. It may go out the window if major financial institutions get in trouble. But for right now, the Fed continues to tighten in the face of an inverted yield curve.

The Fed is not going to reverse course just to save the stock market, at least as long as price inflation is above 3%. But if we have a deep recession and consumer demand plummets, it is possible that price inflation could go down significantly in the coming year.

If the Fed reacts and starts expanding its balance sheet again, then I believe gold will enter a new bull market. If the Fed just stops tightening but doesn’t move to an easy money policy either, then expect almost everything to go down.

But again, gold will go down less.

So even if gold isn’t going higher in 2023, what are your alternatives? I don’t recommend a large position in stocks or real estate right now. I certainly don’t recommend cryptos. Maybe some bonds are a good idea for diversification, but they have risks too.

That leaves gold and cash. I think gold is a great form of diversification right now. It may not shine brightly in 2023, but it may be the least bad option at this point for a good chunk of your portfolio.

If and when the Fed starts loosening again, then all bets are off. I expect gold to go higher, and I expect gold mining stocks will have the potential to go up in multiples of where they are now.

The ruling class have always been against the people, at least in the United States for anyone alive today. However, the ruling class are more exposed today for a variety of reasons.

Technology is likely the number one reason, as people can communicate and disseminate information almost instantaneously. We no longer have to rely on just the establishment news sources to get information (or disinformation).

There are other reasons as well. Donald Trump helped to expose the establishment. Sometimes it wasn’t on purpose. The Ron Paul presidential campaigns woke up a small segment of the population, and many of these people are still trying to spread the message of liberty. There is a stronger libertarian movement in the U.S. today than at any time in the last century.

The ruling class itself has overplayed its hand. You can see this with Donald Trump. They try so desperately to smack him down that they just look pathetic at times. They have also become more bold in their rhetoric and their actions, which have been especially evident since the COVID hysteria began in 2020.

Since the ruling elite are more exposed, they are also fighting back. They are digging in hard, and they are out to destroy those who threaten their power.

This is why online censorship has become so prevalent. The government and the powers-that-be would prefer that some people know they are censoring rather than risk information getting out there that would hurt them.

When something looks bad for the establishment, they are often choosing the lesser of evils. It is better for the establishment to have everyone just think that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered than to risk having him reveal any secrets. It is better for them to withhold documents on the Kennedy assassination than for people to find out what really happened.

More people are better informed today because they are paying attention and because they have alternative sources for information. This is a great risk to the ruling class, and they know it.

This makes it an incredibly opportune time to smack down the ruling class and to gain greater liberty. But it is also a very risky time because the ruling elite will not easily relinquish their power.

It will be incredibly dangerous for anyone to challenge particular individuals or agencies. If they are a threat to the ruling elite’s power, then they will be threatened and risk harm.

The best way to take down the ruling class and dramatically reduce the size and scope of government is to continue informing others and making them realize who their true enemies are.

If a majority, or even a sizable minority, are well educated and understand the benefits of liberty, then the people ruling over us will lose their power. They cannot rule for long without the consent of the people.

The social media companies have been engaging in widespread censorship, especially since COVID and the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.  It isn’t just conservatives and libertarians being censored.  It is really anyone who is going against the establishment narrative who is vulnerable to censorship.

There have been calls from some people for the government to regulate social media companies to ensure free speech.  This is completely wrong and anti liberty.  It is especially crazy to suggest such a thing when it is the government that is largely behind the censoring.

If the government played absolutely no role in censorship, it is hard to say what would be happening now.  Maybe we would still see widespread censorship just because it is seen as the culturally popular thing to do.  Chances are, though, there would be a lot less censorship coming from big tech companies.

Property rights should be respected, so libertarians should not ever call for government intervention to prevent a private company from engaging in censorship.  The problem we have is that there is already government intervention, and it is unlawful and immoral.

It was already obvious that the government was, at the very least, pressuring social media companies to censor or hide anything of significance that went against the establishment narrative.  With Elon Musk buying Twitter and releasing documents, we now have the proof that the FBI and the executive branch (at a minimum) have been telling Twitter what to censor.

It would be naïve to think that this isn’t going on with other major social media and big tech companies like Facebook and Google.

My Blog

I originally started this blog using Blogger/ Blogspot, which are owned by Google.  At some point, I switched over to WordPress, which I actually don’t find that user friendly.  I also lost traffic when I switched, although some of that could have been my fault for broken links that were supposed to point back to my own posts.

I have used WordPress for quite a while now, and I can see the traffic.  It is far lower than it was when I used Blogger.  I have a small group of loyal followers who either get an email with my posts or check out my site periodically, but I still get some traffic referred from search engines.

I can tell you that I get almost no referrals from Google, which is the biggest search platform.  I get the most referrals from DuckDuckGo.  Maybe there are more libertarians or people searching for libertarian things on DuckDuckGo, but it shouldn’t be this imbalanced considering DuckDuckGo has a small fraction of the users as Google.

Interestingly, despite my many criticisms of Bill Gates, I do get some hits from Bing.  I get more from Bing than I do from Google.

I have no doubt that Google is censoring my posts because of what they say.  I have been a critic of lockdowns and COVID vaccines since the beginning of those things, and I have had my share of things to say about Trump (some positive and some not).

Google is hiding my posts on purpose because they go against the establishment narrative.  I used to get many hits coming from Google, even after I had switched to WordPress.  It was my primary source of traffic.  If you search for “libertarian investments”, you will probably find my site.  But if you search for words related to a post on the site, you probably won’t find it on the first page of Google results, if at all.

I’m just relaying this personal experience because it is indicative of what is happening.  The big tech companies are censoring content that goes against the establishment narrative.  And it is likely coming directly from the FBI or some other government agency.  Twitter wasn’t/ isn’t alone on this front.

Illegal Pressuring

Maybe this goes against the 1^St Amendment.  It certainly goes against the spirit of the 1^st Amendment.  But that says that Congress shall make no law.  And technically, Congress hasn’t made a law here except in that it funds the FBI.

If you want to look at the amendment really being violated, it is the same amendment that is violated almost all of the time.  The 10^th Amendment states that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the States or the people.

There is no authority in the Constitution that grants any government agency the right to censor anyone, or to threaten any company to get them to censor anyone.

The people telling Twitter and any other companies what to censor are breaking the law.  They are committing a criminal act and should be prosecuted.  But the criminals are the ones in charge, so that isn’t happening.  We haven’t even seen an apology, let alone a resignation, from the head of the FBI.

Of course, Biden and company know what is happening and are in on it.  They are criminals as well.  They are trying to shut people up, and they are doing it by threatening the use of government violence.

The only thing that will stop this is a mass awakening by the public.  The good news is that more people are awakening to the evil establishment forces.  The ruling elite criminals are not just Democrats, which many Republicans are starting to realize.

Elon Musk didn’t really tell us much that we didn’t already know (for those paying attention), but it is proof.  And it has also awakened more people and put the discussion out there.  More Americans are losing faith in the system, which they should.  Now they need to withdraw their consent.

We are told to follow the science.  We are told that the data tells us to get vaccinated.  We were once told that it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  We have continually been told that the COVID vaccines are safe and effective.

Where is the data?  The placebo groups in the vaccine trials were told to go ahead and get jabbed because it was so important to be vaccinated.  So we have no control group from the vaccine trials, which was done on purpose.  We do have a control group in the tens of millions of Americans who were able to avoid the shots, but there is no tracking of the impacts (on purpose).

In a recent NBC “News” article, it says all of these wonderful things about the COVID shots in spite of their shortcomings.  Yet there are two sentences that make a surprising admission.

“Six in 10 adults who died of Covid in August were vaccinated or boosted, according to a report by KFF, a nonprofit health think tank.  And for the most part, vaccinated people don’t avoid infections or reinfections anymore.”

So the establishment mouthpiece of NBC is admitting that the majority of COVID deaths are people who are vaccinated.  Now, I understand the counterarguments quite well.  There are more people who are vaccinated than non-vaccinated. Amongst older people, there are an even higher percentage of people vaccinated, and it is mostly older people who supposedly die of COVID.

Still, what kind of “vaccines” are these?  Does this really count for being “effective”?  If the majority of people who die of COVID are vaccinated, then the vaccines are doing a lousy job of being effective.

My guess is that the rate of vaccinated deaths is actually much higher than what is being stated here, if for nothing else that we have been continually lied to.  There are other reasons to doubt the data as well.

But even if we trust this data, it is not a good selling point for the vaccines.  And it is also the wrong overall measure.  The question isn’t whether the vaccines make you less likely to die of COVID.  The question is whether the vaccines make you less likely to die.  And this is the big missing statistic.

It actually goes beyond death too.  You can have a vaccine injury that does not necessarily result in a premature death but does result in a reduced lifestyle.  Let’s say I am told that a vaccine will reduce my risk of death by 50% for something that kills 1 out of 10,000 people.  But if I take the vaccine, there is a one out of a thousand risk of an autoimmune disease or partial paralysis of my body.  I would probably choose not to take the vaccine.

Still, even if we just use death as a measurement, we have to look at the overall mortality rate.  In the Pfizer trial (see page 23), more people died in the vaccinated group than in the non-vaccinated group, yet they hailed it as a success because there was one less person in the vaccinated group who died of COVID.

If a vaccine saves you from one thing but kills you anyway, then what’s the point?

It is very hard to get overall mortality statistics out of the CDC, but we know that there has been excess mortality since 2020.  The excess deaths in 2020 can be explained by COVID, or more likely, the mistreatment of people who tested positive for COVID.  The lockdowns and the fear of the virus could have also contributed to premature death for some.

So how do you explain that deaths were even higher in 2021?  Insurance companies have reported a spike in deaths since 2021 for younger (working age) people.  Wouldn’t the number of deaths go down with a working vaccine?

It is actually probably worse than this because some people died prematurely in 2020, which means the death rate should have gone down from there.  Think of it this way.  In 2020, you have a person who is 85 years old.  He gets COVID and goes to the hospital.  He is put on a ventilator and dies.  If he hadn’t gotten COVID and been put on a ventilator, maybe he would have lived to be 87.  But since he died in 2020, he can’t die in 2022.  So that is one less death for 2022 because it happened earlier.

Yet, in 2021, and probably in 2022, we are still getting excess deaths.  But nobody seems to want to talk about this except for the hardcore vaccine skeptics.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of the people who have died in the last 18 to 22 months were vaccinated as compared to the rest of the population.  It would be particularly interesting to know about younger people.

But we won’t see these statistics come out of the government or the pharmaceutical companies.  They don’t want them to be known for a reason.

The FOMC released its latest statement on monetary policy.  The federal funds target rate has been hiked by another 50 basis points, while the balance sheet continues to drain slowly.

This is all in the face of an inverted yield curve, which is the best predictor of a coming recession.

You probably don’t need to be an expert in Austrian school economics to understand that there is major economic trouble ahead.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to invoke the face of the Austrian school, Ludwig Von Mises.

Mises wrote:

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.  The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

The Fed had a very loose monetary policy from 2008 to 2014.  It looked like we were going to get a recession in 2020, but then COVID hysteria happened, which gave the Fed an excuse to more than double its balance sheet again in a short period of time.  This delayed the recession.

So why doesn’t the Fed just delay the next recession too, and do the same thing again?

As Mises explained, eventually it ends up in what he called a crack-up boom.  This means that there is some form of hyperinflation and the currency is destroyed.

I have long held that the Fed is not likely to engage in hyperinflation.  We can get relatively high price inflation like we see now, but the Fed doesn’t want to destroy the dollar.  That’s why we see the Fed tightening now.

Even if the Fed didn’t tighten, we would still eventually see a major recession.  Mises pointed out that even the slowing of the rate of growth of the money supply will eventually be enough to bring on the correction in the malinvestment.

But we are in an environment where there is major malinvestment from previous Fed actions, and now the Fed is raising interest rates and draining its balance sheet, even if slowly.  The yield curve is heavily inverted, yet the Fed continues to tighten.

The theme for the rest of this year and 2023 will be to live like we are in a recession.  This is the best way to prepare for a recession.  You should try to lower your spending, even in the face of price inflation, and you can hopefully set aside some extra money.

But the most important aspect of living like we are in a recession now is that it prepares you mentally.  You will not be as disoriented when the recession does hit, and you are less likely to make a stupid mistake.  It will also be less difficult for you to cut back since you have already cut back.

The recession is likely to hit hard in 2023.  Maybe the worst won’t be until 2024.  But unless the Fed drastically reverses course, there is a recession on the horizon.  Even if the Fed does reverse course, it probably won’t be enough to stop it at this point, unless they do resort to mass inflation.

Let’s hope that the Fed doesn’t reverse course so that we get the lesser of two evils.

The latest CPI report came out today and showed that consumer prices overall rose just 0.1% last month in November.  It was expected to be 0.3%.

The year-over-year price inflation still stands at 7.1%, which is obviously well above the Fed’s supposed target of 2%.

Stocks responded well on the news in the morning.  Perhaps investors are expecting the Fed to be a little less hawkish on inflation going forward, although more rate increases are expected.

Even if the Fed stops increasing its target rate after the December meeting, I don’t think there is any stopping the coming recession.  Unless the Fed responds at least as aggressively as it did in March 2020 when it began the more than doubling of its balance sheet, there is no stopping the economic pain coming in 2023.

And if the Fed did something crazy to stave off a recession, it would only make things worse in the long run.

The yields are highly inverted right now, which is the best warning sign of a coming recession as there is.  Meanwhile, the Fed is still raising rates and slowly draining its balance sheet in the face of a highly inverted yield curve.

I don’t think people are processing just how bad things are going to get.  We already have situations of shortages.  Debt continues to go higher not just for government, but for families as well.  With the high price inflation, real wages have been going down, but the tax bills aren’t going down with them.

Middle class America is already hurting, and that is with a relatively low unemployment rate.  While a recession might ease consumer price inflation, there will also be a massive asset deflation.  Stocks and real estate have already hit some turmoil, but it is likely to get much worse.

Once the recession becomes evident, people will start tightening their belts.  This will cause business activity to slow down greatly, and we will see a massive shift of resources in the economy.  This will cause greater unemployment, and it will cause many company bankruptcies to the extent that the government doesn’t bail them out.

Most businesses are not some kind of money laundering scheme like FTX, but it doesn’t mean they don’t get sucked in to the bubble economy and over invest.  The companies that are overleveraged will have trouble paying their bills.

I expect stocks to get absolutely hammered in 2023.  I also expect housing prices to generally go down, but they also may be more responsive if the Fed reverses course on its monetary policy and starts inflating again.

While the government sends tens of billions of dollars off to the money pit of Ukraine, middle class Americans suffer and will continue to suffer.

It is best to start living like it is a recession now.  Then the adjustment won’t be as hard.  Many Americans will be in for a shock when the good times stop rolling next year.  I think many are already starting to face reality, but they just don’t fully believe it yet.  They have seen their purchasing power decline, but they don’t believe that it will continue or that it will get significantly worse.

If you live like you are in a recession now, then you will be more mentally prepared when the recession actually hits.

For those who have opposed COVID lockdowns and mandates, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has been something of a hero, at least for many.  Some people don’t know or forget that DeSantis actually did lock down Florida in April 2020.

Luckily, he realized his mistake quickly.  I have no idea how much of it was political instinct and how much of it was a genuine appreciation for liberty and common sense.  By September 2020, Florida was completely open and the only mandates left were some mask ordinances from county/ local governments.  Most of the rest of the United States still had major restrictions at the state level.

When I became aware of a lockdown in Florida in late March 2020 (set for April), I was referring to DeSantis as Dictator DeSantis to my friends and family.  I wrote an email to DeSantis and the mayor where I live.  I recently came across those emails, which are almost identical.

Here is a copy of my email to DeSantis on March 31, 2020.  I am only leaving off my personal information at the end. Everything else is word for word.

********

Dear Governor DeSantis,

With all of the fear surrounding the coronavirus, there have been major business shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, and other measures taken by government officials at all levels.  I am absolutely opposed to any such measures from the government, whether it is at the federal, state, or local level.  If people feel they are at risk, they can voluntarily stay at home and isolate themselves from others.  Just because there is fear of a pandemic, it does not entitle anyone to become a dictator.  That includes mayors, governors, and the president.  I urge you to resist calling for any more government shutdowns and to immediately repeal those shutdowns that were already ordered.  This is for the sake of liberty and our economic future.

Sincerely,

********

As you can see, I was firm, but relatively polite.  I have no idea if this had any impact at all.  But I know that some politicians just need some encouragement at times to do what is right.  Sometimes they need to hear from others to gain enough courage to do the right thing.

I feel fortunate to have lived (and continue to live) in Florida during a time of hysteria, panic, and government totalitarianism.  I realize how much better my family and me had it compared to others.

Have you ever wondered why people who were so wrong in the past still have a platform for their views?  This can span across all subjects, but I have really been thinking about this with regard to COVID.

It is really quite striking how this occurs.  Take the Iraq War as an example.  Some people got it wrong just because they listened to the wrong people and believed what they were being told by the media and politicians.  And then there were some people who were cheerleaders for the war and pushed it hard.

These people either blatantly lied or they were just completely wrong about weapons of mass destruction.  Iraq under Saddam Hussein never posed any threat whatsoever to the U.S.  Perhaps Hussein just wasn’t obedient enough to the U.S. government.

Anyway, the people who pushed the war the hardest are the same people who are still to this day on television analyzing foreign policy.  They get to comment on Ukraine and Russia and everything else.  Why would anybody listen to them?

There are some rare people like Tucker Carlson who admit they were wrong.  In fact, Carlson goes well beyond this because he has learned from his mistakes (mainly, trusting the regime).  So I don’t mind listening to Tucker Carlson on foreign policy topics because he admits that he was wrong on the Iraq War and his views have changed dramatically.

COVID Hysteria and “Vaccines”

I realized recently that most of the people who were right on almost everything from the very beginning of COVID hysteria are people who don’t have much of a platform to this day.  There are exceptions.

Of course, the talking heads on CNN or other establishment media outlets were wrong on almost everything.  They just move on as if they were never wrong.  They will never admit to being wrong.  If they are questioned, they will just say that they were following the science and the science changed.

How does the science change?  Doesn’t that mean that they were just guessing in the first place?  And if they were just guessing, then there was no justification of forcing their views on others.  From my standpoint, there’s no justification for forcing your views on others at all, even if they are grounded in fact.

Why would anyone listen to someone like Fauci or Biden at this point when it comes to anything COVID, or really anything at all?  They are quite obviously liars.  They didn’t just make mistakes.  If they just made honest mistakes, then they would have occasionally gotten something right.

Biden just flat out lies about stupid things all the time.  He makes up his own stories.  But he repeated several times in 2021 that if you are vaccinated, you can’t die.

Even if this were true, he was extremely loose and inaccurate with his words.  Perhaps what he meant to say was that if you have taken the COVID vaccine, then you can’t die of COVID.

But even if he had said it more precisely, it was still a complete lie.  And then he tries to force the shot on 100 million Americans with the loss of their job.  He has also banned foreigners from entering the country without vaccination proof, even though there is widespread admission now that the so-called COVID vaccines do not stop transmission.

The people who pushed COVID hysteria but who now just quietly move on are generally immoral people.  It is fine to get things wrong, but it is not fine to advocate the use of force on other people.  Anyone who supported lockdowns or vaccine mandates should absolutely never be trusted.  They shouldn’t have a platform.  They should be begging for forgiveness.

The problem I have is that there were some people who got completely suckered in at the beginning.  Since that time, they have come around to the other side.  Some of it was not out of principle.  They just saw that the wind had shifted.  This is what the governor of Texas did.  He opened up Texas when he saw how popular DeSantis was becoming for opening up Florida early on.  For this reason, you should never trust Greg Abbott on anything.  He is just better than some other politicians because at least he stopped the tyranny when he realized it was no longer popular.

Some of the harshest critics today of the COVID vaccines are people who actually got the vaccine.  Maybe some of them were vaccine injured or saw other people around them who were injured.  In most cases, they just realized that they had been lied to.

I am not talking about some of the doctors on Fox News who now give wishy-washy warnings about COVID vaccines, or lightly criticize them for not stopping transmission.  These people have just hopped on the bandwagon.  They were shills for the vaccines a year ago.

I am talking about some of the hardcore critics.  Some of them are very good, and they sound very scientific.  But where was their science when the shots first came out and they thought they were good?

I don’t want to oppose them because they are on my team now, so to speak.  And they are often quite effective in their opposition to the COVID vaccines and COVID tyranny in general.

The thing I struggle with is why they have the big platform.  It’s like the military guy who goes to war and realizes that he’s fighting a war for lies.  He comes home and speaks out against the war and gets the biggest audience.  Yet, there were people who were never duped and never supported the war in the first place.

Getting It Right From the Beginning

I think of Ron Paul in March 2020.  He was speaking out against the COVID tyranny from the very beginning of it.  He said that kids need to be outside playing football.  I remember it very clearly, and I remember being quite happy hearing someone that was on my side.

I still to this day don’t know why I never once bought into the hysteria.  I never “social distanced” from anyone from my end.  I know little about science and viruses, but I knew it was ridiculous to be closing beaches and outside parks.  A very quick search on the internet at the time confirmed that viruses break up in the sun.  This was before Google started rigging all of the results for the regime on anything COVID.  If the official science was saying that in 2019 and before, then why were things being shut down everywhere in 2020, including outside places?

The biggest reason I never bought into the lies was because I knew that the ruling elite defaulted to lying about anything of importance.  When the establishment media, politicians, and bureaucrats are all singing the same tune in unison, I figure it must be a lie.  I have to at least assume it is a lie until I can prove otherwise.

Ron Paul was right on COVID from the very beginning.  It helps a lot when your views are grounded with principles.  In this case, it is the principle to not initiate force against others.  Even if COVID was as bad as they said it was, it does not somehow make it moral to lock people down.  It does not make it moral to force people to get injections that they don’t want.

I certainly welcome those who changed their views and came to the correct side, as long as it was done for the right reasons.  They need to demonstrate that they will never again fall into a moral trap of advocating force on others.

But I would like recognition that there were some people who took the moral high ground the entire time.  There were some people who were correct the entire time.  They didn’t have to wait until it was ok to have divergent views from the mainstream media.

I will remember who got it right and who got it wrong.  And for those who got it wrong, I know the people who quickly straightened course and those who changed with the wind.  Personally, I would rather listen to the people who got it right from the beginning or near the beginning than others who took a while.

When it comes to China and the Chinese government, I feel like only libertarians get the issue right, if anyone at all.  There is a lot of nuance.

There is a difference between the Chinese people and the Chinese government.  There is also a difference between the Chinese rulers’ goals on foreign policy and their goals domestically.

There were big protests going on in China, presumably because of the harsh COVID lockdowns that have persisted to this day.  It is a much scarier thing to protest in China than in the United States.  If you are American, you just need to not use violence and not enter any government buildings (i.e., the Capitol), and you will most likely be ok.

If you are Chinese and you protest or speak out against the ruling elite, you risk getting arrest, or perhaps even disappearing.

I have again heard some conservatives and libertarians criticizing Americans because even the Chinese are protesting and Americans just don’t care.  But as I pointed out many months ago and last year when there were mass protests in Europe and elsewhere, the reason Americans aren’t protesting as much is because there is less to protest.  We haven’t had any lockdowns in 2022, and most mandates (with some notable exceptions) have gone away.

With that said, it is also unfortunate that conservatives and leftists are getting things wrong on China.

Conservatives

I hear so many conservatives taking political shots at China.  Some of them are even half-decent on other foreign policy matters.  Of course, Donald Trump has done that since at least 2015, and he slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, which served to make things more expensive for Americans.

Conservatives who like to bash China are mostly just trying to score political points.  They are also finding someone to blame for their own shortcomings, collectively speaking.

I hear that China is this big threat to America.  I’ll actually hear conservatives say that China is manipulating their currency.

My response: “Yeah, no kidding.  Just like the Federal Reserve and every other central bank on the planet.”

To talk about China as a currency manipulator is a joke.  Let the Chinese people worry about their own central bank.  If anything, Chinese currency manipulation has made things cheaper for Americans.

On foreign policy, conservatives like to make China out to be the bogeyman.  It isn’t all that different from what the left does with Russia.

China is certainly run by some bad people (like just about every government), but they aren’t the communists of old.  Economically, China is far more open than it was 40 or 50 years ago, and the Chinese people are a lot wealthier.

It is mostly a Keynesian system now, but this type of central planning if far preferable to a communist system.  There are major civil liberty issues in China, including the rights (or lack of) to protest and speak out.  But the totalitarianism is against the Chinese people.  The Chinese government is not showing any signs of wanting to take over the world.  They are having enough trouble keeping their own subjects in line.

As long as the U.S. government doesn’t provoke things, China is not a threat to Americans.  The Chinese are not interested in a major war.  The Chinese government wants China to become an economic powerhouse, but in their own way, while keeping the people obedient.

The Political Left

The stuff coming from the political left these days is rich.  We get to hear from Fauci who refers to the draconian lockdowns in China.  We get to hear from Trudeau who says he supports the right of the people to protest.

Let the hypocrisy flow.

It is amazing to hear all of these people criticizing China for the harsh lockdowns.  Hello!  Does anybody remember 2020, and even 2021, in the United States of America?

These people criticizing the Chinese government are tyrants themselves.  They just don’t like that the Chinese government is too in your face with it.  They need to do it with a bigger smile on their faces.  They need to do it all in the name of protecting people.  They need to do it for the children.

For the left, it is ok to terrorize people and order them around.  You just have to do it in a way that resonates.  The people have to feel like they can’t live without their benevolent rulers.

When Americans were forced into lockdown, it was for the health and safety for everyone.  If China does it for a bit longer, it is a human rights violation.

Conclusion

There is a lot of nuance when it comes to China.  It is a much freer country than it was prior to 1980.  But there is also a great deal of totalitarianism, and I hope that the Chinese people are able to break free from it.

But the American politicians and media talking about China is just terrible to hear.  They are either wrong or being highly hypocritical.  They are also using it as a distraction and for blame for their own failures.

Americans shouldn’t worry about the Chinese, or at least not to the extent that the government should do anything about it.  The best things that Americans can do for the Chinese is to trade with them and to set a good example for liberty.