Two individuals cannot make fiction to be fact by an agreement

An outgoing unpopular president cannot by one meeting invent something that does not and never existed. There is only an independent republic of Taiwan and a separate, repeat distinct, communist dictatorship of China.

Tsai Ing-wen gets it wrong about moms and childcare

It was disappointing to read Tsai Ing-wen's uninformed and uninspiring policy talk reported in the Taipei Times today.

Is it not better for loved ones (the elderly and children) to be cared for by those who love them: their family members? Tsai Ing-wen is not a mom. But she should realize something: it is much better for the country if the moms are not forced to work but have a choice whether they wish to stay home to raise their own children. But many families are strapped for cash because of Ma Ying-jeou's pro-China and pro-corrupt developer policies that have driven up real estate prices and at the same time driven jobs and capital investment to China.

Spending tax money to provide more day care for children is not the answer, but rather further perpetuates the problem by bloating the government with more entitlements that will put the squeeze on tax payers. Already the national healthcare system is going bankrupt so that the government is finding more ways to tax citizens, hidden of course by taxing companies or those who have passive income. But to tax one is ultimately to tax all. Costs get passed down. Tax a company more and it reduces the size of its workforce, or the level of pay. Or it increases the cost of the product. The buyer ends up paying the tax indirectly but not knowing about it. Disproportionately tax a writer who gets passive royalties as income so that she has to pay a higher level for national health care, and she may just decide the massive hours she puts into a book are not worth it and not write another book. Who loses? To get money such a writer will be forced into a regular job where the employer gets hit with the hidden cost. Her creative output will be suppressed. The net sum of intellectual property in Taiwan will go down.

Tsai Ing-wen should be asking how she might help women to be able to stay home with their children by setting policies that will make more higher income jobs available to their husbands. She should be seeking to reduce the size of government and therefore the tax burden. Further she should seek to eliminate the hemorrhaging of jobs and money flowing to China. She should further embrace efficient fossil fuel burning plants rather than worry about carbon footprints of supposed anthropogenic global warming. Yes, we are too geologically unstable for nuclear power, but the earth can afford greater emissions of CO2. In fact, it will like it. Plants thrive on higher CO2 levels and grow faster. Taiwan needs to upgrade fossil-fuel burning plants to be more high tech, therefore more efficient burners, therefore emitting less of anything except CO2.

These things would help rather than more entitlement spending. Yes, please stay away from KMT fascist cronies and China's commies, but also please do not import failed policies from Europe's proggies.

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Proggies: progressivists = socialist, statists, or soft communists/fascists who think the government should have its hand on everything as if it were a goddess to be worshipped.

Like the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, the Katyn Massacre in Poland was a decapitation of the society's leaders by a foreign invader

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, when the Soviets executed over 22,000 Polish officers, nobles, policemen, intellectuals, and clergy. the Katyn Massacre took place 7 years before the 228 Massacre. There are similar estimates in the death toll. And the massacre represented an attempt to remove any opposition to a foreign authoritarian regimes invasion and suppression of a nation.

Wikipedia entry

Taiwan should reach out to Poland based on this historically shared suffering.

Seen in a local Taipei park...

China's exports are down... labor costs up...

This just in...

The National Review almost gets it right...

Good call in a January 24 National Review article for the U.S. to recognize Taiwan. However, this writer gets his details wrong.

First, the good points:

"But in the end, this is what matters: Taiwan, like Israel, is a free country loomed over by barbarous, genocidal despots. Like Israel, it needs, and deserves, our support. Kennedy didn’t vow only that we would “oppose any foe,” but also that we would “support any friend . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty."... Words to live by. He meant friends like Taiwan, like Israel, and — I dare say — like the oppressed people of Cuba."

Thanks, for taking the time to notice the 23 million people of Taiwan, a country triple the population of Israel and double that of Cuba. In fact the nation of Taiwan has a population greater than over half the U.N. member states. And thanks for using the word "unification" to describe China's goal rather than the phony "REunification." But better still would be to use the term, "annexation," as in the "anschluss" of Austria by Hitler's Nazi Germany.

BUT Josh Gelernter and the National Review editors (who should know better) get a lot wrong, and so let us correct your misinformation.

It's "the dictators of China," not "mainland" China. Cuba does not call the U.S. "mainland America." No, Puerto Rico and Hawaii will call the Lower 48, "the mainland." Do you see the difference? Please do not just parrot communist propaganda. You're the National Review, not Time Magazine!

And Taiwan does not claim ownership of communist-subjugated China. The dictatorship did. And one party (run by Chinese exiles and KMT gangsters) in Taiwan does. But the Taiwanese people do not. And as soon as the Chinese Nationalist Party can be ousted from their majority in the legislature, that can be rectified. It is because of America's foolish ambiguity that it has taken so long for the Taiwanese people, without America's help, to throw off the dictatorial regime of the KMT. And it is still doing so, no thanks to the U.S. who supported the KMT in recent elections. Be fair. Without any help from America, it is a slow process to get rid of all the remnant of the ridiculous KMT era of pretend rule over all of China.

"Chiang Kai-shek, who ran Taiwan as a (somewhat benevolent) dictator" you say? How many tens of thousands of people does Chiang Kai-shek's regime have to murder, how much theft of other people's property and freedom does the KMT have to perpetrate before you remove the "somewhat benevolent" label, Mr. Gelernter?

Try reading Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr the next time you get the inward urge to make positive comments (qualified with parentheses or not) about the KMT dictatorship.

Gerrit van der Wees, Editor of Taiwan Communique interview

It is all for your good, the greater good, so they say...

Political Wisdom in Literature:

"Without they wear the lambskin, within they are wolves;
Their actions are not in accord with their utterance;
these two-nature creatures will swear by the cross,
by the sun and the moon, to steer you astray;
with the sweetest of speeches they swindle their fellows;
they will steal both your substance and soul with their falsehood.
(Attributed to Cynewulf c. 900 A.D. translated by Richard Wilbur.)

C.S. Lewis warned us about people like these, saying: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."