Conrad Black on Democrats Start To Perceive Debacle They Face, being how almost impregnable PDT’s current election prospects are. But of particular interest are Black’s comments on China-US trade.

In the trade dispute with China, where even the Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, sides with the president, the United States cannot lose. China’s tremendous economic progress is based on debt-financed infrastructure, dumping cheap goods abroad, especially in the United States, and requiring industrial-intelligence disclosure from sophisticated foreign companies that seek access to Chinese markets.

Everyone agrees that China cheats and ignores World Trade Organization rulings, and practically every trading nation in the world applauds the U.S. president’s stance in this dispute. Eighty percent of the U.S. GDP is domestic commerce, and with a year to reorient itself, it could practically end all imports. China is a debt-ridden house of cards built on what is still a 40% command economy, rotten with official corruption in a country with few natural resources and 300 million people who still live as their ancestors did a thousand years ago.

One more example showing how centralised economies do not and cannot work.