Roaming around the Internet Wednesday I learned that three Chinese women, Zhang Yin, Wu Yajun and Chen Lihua have a combined net worth of $13.7 billion and made their fortunes in business starting from scratch. They may be the three wealthiest self-made women on the world’s business scene.
One of them made her fortune dealing in scrap paper. Perhaps China’s fireworks manufacturers are among her largest customers. If so, exports of fireworks to the United States provided her with a chunk of her wealth. Exports to the U.S. and the rest of the wealthy world make China the largest holder of the world’s currency reserves and are creating people like Zhng, Wu and Chen who will become more and more difficult for China’s oppressive government to oppress.
Those who said that free enterprise would be the end of Communism in China were wrong … or perhaps they were just early.
About the same time that the lady billionaires were brought onto the world’s front pages it was also announced that 23 retiring Chinese Community Party officials published a stinging statement calling on the central government to stop censoring the news and allow freedom of expression. The standout feature of this story was that the 23 were not arrested that afternoon and slapped into jail.
That doesn’t signal the end of oppressive one-party rule. It does mean that things are achanging for the better in Beijing.
THE SAME blog reported that Christy and Alice Walton make the Chinese trio look like pitiful paupers. They have a combined worth of $34 billion and didn’t have to lift a finger to put all that Walmart wealth into their own bank accounts. What does that prove? Well, (1) that one needn’t be Chinese to be a billionaire and (2) that arguments against the U.S. estate tax and restoration of the upper brackets of the income tax to 1999 levels have been overblown.
If Christy and Alice manage to earn 3 percent on their stash, a modest goal, their annual income will be more than $1 billion. Even if they must share it with one another and the tax collectors in D.C. and Little Rock, they’ll get by.
You are dead right, constant reader, we’ve let this economic royalty thing get out of hand.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
