Noah Smith: I support free trade!...if we are competitive...
I have to get this off my chest.
"China" was the original neolib Gen X grift. If you replaced "China" with Website, Blockchains, NFT, or AI, and it's the exact same Finance Bro grift.
- Invest in my China company, China will revolutionize the marketplace. Trust me, I'm an MBA.
- Invest in my Website company, websites will revolutionize the in the market place. Trust me, I'm an MBA.
- Invest in my Blockchain company, blockchains will revolutionize the in the market place. Trust me, I'm an MBA.
- Invest in my NFT company, NFTs will revolutionize the market place. Trust me, I'm an MBA.
- Invest in my AI company, AI will revolutionize the market place. Trust me, I'm an MBA.
Every single time, you get a lot of useless bullshit for a full generation. Every western store was filled with low-quality garbage because that's all the expats would import into the west. It's the same thing as Pets.com having a $100 million IPO despite having no actual business, and the endless "AI" that's just DeepSeek on AWS Bedrock.
And every single time, you get the backlash. All of the anti-China racism boils down to backlash against grifting bottom-barrel goods.