re: #146 JCM

Adam Smith.
The invisible hand of enlightened self interest.

It is in some respects amazing to me how very close ancient China came to becoming the birthplace of liberty, enterprise, and even industrialism. One of the great ironies of history is that the Mandarin class that grew up around the Imperial System, the men who’d earned their positions (meritocracy in action) on the basis of their literacy, education, and familiarity with the principles of Confucianism, were the very ones who ties China down in a million ways with pointless and petty bureaucratic red-tape, ultimately strangling liberty and progress in its cradle. And this by precisely the sort of stupid over-regulation that Confucius had warned against.