History confirms that efficiency talk can lead a people away from freedom. Efficiency was the argument for shifting American manufacturing to China in the 1980s and 1990s. The result was the decline of freedom in the United States, and the rise of China as the superpower of oppression. In repressive conditions, workers in China make our cell phones and much else. They are instruments in a political project that has no purpose beyond the pleasure of their rulers, who (for example) find it efficient to sell the organs of murdered political dissenters and the hair of ethnic minorities imprisoned
...more
