在常看的微信公众号当中,有一位叫海边的西塞罗的,他非常喜欢讨论时事,而且在讨论时事的时候总能从各种中外历史当中找出类似的案例,用非常生动丰富的语言夹叙夹议,仿佛能够让你从这些历史历史事件和当下的时事的相似性中，体会到一种类似规律的东西。
这个公众号从他一开始我就关注了,因为他的第一篇大火的文章推出的时候正好是2020年美国总统大选纠纷如火如荼的时候,当时的总统川普认为选举结果存在舞弊,而拒绝承认结果,这件事也是当时全世界的焦点。当时西塞罗就写了多篇文章分析这件事情,还类比了罗马历史上的卡里卡拉大帝普发公民权成为罗马帝国衰落的起点来类比美国的选举政治。认为不管选举是不是存在舞弊,光是邮寄选票这一做法就将参与投票的门槛拉到了近乎为零,起到了和古罗马普发公民权完全一样的效果。所以说这场选举纷争也是标志着美国体制衰落的标志性事件,当时觉得这个分析非常有道理,就成为了他的长期读者。
不过从后来的文章来看,他并不像一开始表现的那么客观。在涉及一些国际焦点事件时,大多站在美国和西方的立场上,比如俄乌战争,从一开始他就认为俄罗斯必然输掉这场战争。而他所类比的就是19世纪沙皇俄国和土耳其、英、法之间的克里米亚战争,在那场战争中沙俄军队遭到了惨败，连沙皇都羞愤自杀。当然历史并没有按照他的意愿重演,乌克兰在西方的支持下苦撑了两年,并没有如愿取得胜利,而战争的结束看上去遥遥无期,这对体量更大的俄罗斯似乎越来越有利了。
然后就是今天要说的，他在最新的一篇文章中讨论了美国是如何超越英国成为新的世界霸主的,当然这个原因就是美国在经济实力上超越了英国。首先,他的文章开头提出了古典经济学之父亚当斯密的一个观点,在独立战争期间,亚当斯密是英国国内少数支持美国独立并最终促成英国从北美体面撤军的重要人物。在给新生的美国提建议的时候,亚当斯密从自己的分工协作和比较优势理论出发,建议美国仍然保持殖民地时期的产业结构,以农业和种植园经济为主,而将工业和制造留在英国,双方通过自由贸易形成互补,就能够共享繁荣了。因为根据比较优势原理的话,如果美国效法英国,也开展工业建设,那么就是在拿自己的短处和英国的长处竞争,这样会让国家耗费资源,导致经济衰败。
但美国建国之后,恰恰是在工业领域迅速崛起,并在19世纪末赶超了英国,并没有遵从亚当斯密所提出的比较优势原理。根据亚当斯密的理论，第一,美国的经济优势在农业和种植业,其二,美国在进行工业化的时候与中国进行工业化,改革开放后工业化进程非常不同的一点是,中国具有得天独厚的比较优势就是人口众多,人力成本较西方低得多,而美国却并不具备这个条件。当时美国的很多工厂的工资都比欧洲大陆要高得多,所以才吸引了大批的欧洲移民前往美国。为什么会这样呢?
西塞罗所从他读的一本讲美国产业政策的书中得出的结论是,因为美国政府的干预提高了关税,从而提高了欧洲工业品的价格,使得人力成本更高的本土工业产品有了竞争力。当然这种竞争力显然只限于美国国内,所以一开始美国的工业品也不可能和欧洲的工业品在世界市场上竞争,而是主打国内市场,这非常类似于现在国内所鼓吹的内循环政策,也就是说他将美国的崛起归功于美国政府干预市场的高关税和内循环政策。
可以说,海边的西塞罗毕竟只是一个文科生,他的很多观点都仅仅来自于通过对类似事件的归纳,这也是他喜欢在讨论时事的时候引经据典。但是文科生的一个缺点就是缺乏逻辑思维能力,从许多相似的事件中总结出规律并不等于就证明这个规律一定存在。最简单的例子就是你看见十只天鹅都是白色的并不等于这个世界上就不存在黑天鹅,实行高关税的国家比比皆是,为什么成功的只有美国呢?而同样在20世纪末21世纪初创造出了经济奇迹的中国却是实行的对外开放和以出口为主要导向的经济改革,这些都说明个例并不能够成为规律,要发现规律还是得从逻辑推理出发,从一个不可否认的事实通过严密的逻辑链条得出的结论才是可靠的,而不是通过一大堆的数据事实然后对它们进行筛选就能够从中找出所谓的规律,这是典型的文革思维对于求真求知是有害的。因为这种做法会有目的性的选择对自己理论有利的证据。却对反例视而不见。就像先射箭再画靶子。
Among the WeChat public accounts that are often seen, there is a Cicero named Seaside, who likes to discuss current affairs very much, and when discussing current affairs, he can always find similar cases from various Chinese and foreign histories, and use very vivid and rich language to describe and discuss, as if you can experience something similar to a law from the similarity between these historical events and current events.
I have been following this official account since the beginning of him, because his first popular article was launched when the 2020 U.S. presidential election dispute was in full swing, and the then President Trump believed that the election results were fraudulent and refused to recognize the results, which was also the focus of the world at that time. At that time, Cicero wrote a number of articles analyzing this matter, and also compared the history of Rome to the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire, and the electoral politics of the United States. Regardless of whether the election was fraudulent or not, the practice of mailing ballots alone lowered the threshold for participation in voting to almost zero, which had the exact same effect as the universal citizenship in ancient Rome. So the election dispute was also a landmark event that marked the decline of the American system, and at the time, he felt that this analysis was very reasonable, and he became a long-term reader.
However, judging from later articles, he is not as objective as he appeared at the beginning. When it comes to some international focus events, most of them stand on the side of the United States and the West, such as the Russian-Ukrainian war, and from the very beginning he believed that Russia would inevitably lose this war. He is analogous to the Crimean War between Tsarist Russia and Turkey, Britain and France in the 19th century, in which the Russian army suffered a crushing defeat and even the Tsar committed suicide in shame. Of course, history did not repeat itself as he wished, and Ukraine, supported by the West, did not achieve victory as he had hoped, and the end of the war seemed far away, which seemed to be increasingly beneficial to the much larger Russia.
And then there's what I'm going to talk about today, and in his latest article he discusses how the United States has surpassed Britain as the new world hegemon, and of course the reason for this is that the United States has surpassed Britain in economic power. First, he begins his essay with a view of Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, who during the Revolutionary War was one of the few prominent figures in Britain who supported American independence and eventually brought about a dignified withdrawal of British troops from North America. When giving advice to the nascent United States, Adam Smith started from his own theory of division of labor and cooperation and comparative advantage, and suggested that the United States should still maintain the industrial structure of the colonial period, with agriculture and plantation economy as the mainstay, while leaving industry and manufacturing in Britain, and the two sides would be able to share prosperity by complementing each other through free trade. This is because, according to the principle of comparative advantage, if the United States follows the example of Britain and also carries out industrial construction, then it is competing with Britain's strengths with its own shortcomings, which will cause the country to consume resources and lead to economic decline.
However, after the founding of the United States, it was precisely in the industrial field that it rose rapidly, and at the end of the 19th century it overtook Britain, and did not follow the principle of comparative advantage proposed by Adam Smith. According to Adam Smith's theory, first, the economic advantage of the United States is in agriculture and planting, and second, the United States is industrializing with China when it is industrializing, and the industrialization process after the reform and opening up is very different in that China has a unique comparative advantage of a large population and much lower labor costs than the West, while the United States does not have this condition. At that time, many factories in the United States had much higher wages than those in continental Europe, which attracted a large number of European immigrants to the United States. Why is this so?
Cicero drew the conclusion from a book he read on U.S. industrial policy that the U.S. government's intervention raised tariffs, which raised the prices of European industrial goods, making domestic industrial products more labor-costly competitive. Of course, this kind of competitiveness is obviously limited to the United States, so at the beginning, it is impossible for American industrial products to compete with European industrial products in the world market, but to focus on the domestic market, which is very similar to the internal circulation policy advocated in China now, that is to say, he attributes the rise of the United States to the high tariffs and internal circulation policy of the US government intervening in the market.
It can be said that Cicero by the sea was only a liberal arts student after all, and many of his opinions came only from generalizing similar events, which is why he likes to quote scriptures when discussing current events. However, one of the shortcomings of liberal arts students is that they lack the ability to think logically, and summing up a law from many similar events does not mean that it must exist. The simplest example is that if you see ten swans are white, it does not mean that there are no black swans in this world, and there are many countries that implement high tariffs, why is only the United States successful? However, China, which also created an economic miracle at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, has implemented economic reform oriented by opening up to the outside world and export-oriented, which shows that individual cases cannot become laws, and to discover the laws must be based on logical reasoning, and the conclusions drawn from an undeniable fact through a strict logical chain are reliable, rather than through a large number of data facts and then sifting through them to find out the so-called laws, which is a typical Cultural Revolution thinking that is harmful to seeking truth and knowledge. Because this approach will have the evidence in favor of one's own theory by making a purposive choice. but turning a blind eye to counterexamples. It's like shooting an arrow first and then drawing a target.
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