I was listening to Victor Davis Hanson yesterday, and he started by rattling off many of the good things America still has going for it: high worker productivity among them. He pointed out that napkin math suggests an American worker is worth four Chinese workers, dividing GDPs by populations.

I filed that supposition away and moved on to this video. I'd always wondered why China isn't another Brazil in terms of national team quality. As it turns out, in North Korea-like fashion, The Party™ top-down dictates the athletic pools. As the guest put it, "there are more excellent wrestlers in Long Island than there are in all of China, because only a tiny part of the citizenry is told or allowed to be wrestlers." American wrestlers who wouldn't get within a mile of the US Olympic team may be tempted to join the Chinese one, if the Chinese so-offered-- and they have.

Putting things together then, Chinese GDP growth is poor given the size of the population. The Chinese aren't particularly good at competitive sports, because the lack of liberalism means the best athletes aren't necessarily surfacing. Got it.

The next piece in this puzzle was inspired within me by this Tucker Carlson segment regarding the Canadian freedom truckers. It's like a form of "Atlas Shrugged", playing out in real life. This was closely followed in my feeds by this.

All of it really got me thinking what America-- and indeed even Canada, and other Western countries-- would look like if they had serious, non-ideological leadership, who were willing to open-mindedly maximize the strengths of Western liberalism, while simultaneously having selective, adversarial "cut throat" protectionism against other countries.

If indeed an American worker is presently worth about four Chinese workers, it's not difficult to imagine them being worth double that or more if the American economy was truly liberalized. Simultaneously, serious leaders would be interested in and proud of "every day Americans", and would take measures to put those best interests first in all matters-- foremost of all, placing clamps on the globalization trends of the past fifty years, which have gutted what used to be the middle class.

America would return to being the world's dominant super power almost overnight. And it wouldn't even be close. It would be so strong, it'd even probably be able to slowly dig itself out of its thirty trillion dollar hole. The very same Victor Davis Hanson wrote a piece recently, detailing what I think would be a really good start towards the very same direction I just described.

This is all impossible though: half of the population in America is strongly authoritarian by nature, and would rather live under some variation of Communistic rule, than endure the responsibility that the fruits of freedom inevitably brings with it. One can thank "K-through-College" brainwashing at the hands of Marxist teachers, professors, and all of popular media for that.