Podbit · Planet Money
China spends only about 10% of annual income on redistribution — half what the US spends and a third of Western Europe's 30%. Despite the communist label, there's no property tax to speak of, and the burden falls on regressive consumption taxes. Welcome to socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Where this was said
At 35:30 · chapter starts 33:25
Robert Smith reconnects with Dan Wang to discuss what Chinese young people are actually saying — and the answer is resonant across the Pacific: they sound like American kids, some checking out, some trying drugs legal in California, none of them convinced they're living in a boom era. [1] — Dan Wang "The Communist Party is trying to engineer its way out of the fertility crisis by sending neighborhood committees door-to-door to ask young …" 34:50 When Smith asks whether the Party's pro-natalist programmes are working, Wang paints a darkly comic picture: the engineering state, unable to accept a problem it can't build its way out of, has sent the Communist Party's lowest-level units — neighbourhood committees — to interrogate young families about their childbearing intentions. In one case Wang recounts from his book, a woman complained the Party had asked about her menstrual cycle six times. Her own parents asked once. It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state's failure mode: treating citizens as inputs in a demographic production function rather than autonomous human beings.
The Communist Party is trying to engineer its way out of the fertility crisis by sending neighborhood committees door-to-door to ask young women about their childbearing intentions — and their menstrual cycles. One woman complained the Party has already asked her six times; her own parents asked once.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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