[Sizzler]

Ben Stein is right. We're all useless, living pointless lives.

The Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.

From the beginning, an element of desperation helped create the Wenzhou business tradition. The region has little arable soil, and the mountainous landscape made for bad roads to the interior. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, developing a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century. But they lost their edge after 1949, when the communists came to power and cut off overseas trade links, as well as most private entrepreneurship. Even in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's free-market reforms began to take hold, Wenzhou started with distinct disadvantages. Residents lacked the education of people in Beijing, and they didn't attract the foreign investment of Shanghai. When the government established the first Special Economic Zone, whose trade and tax privileges were designed to spur growth, they chose Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong.

But Wenzhou had the priceless capital of native instinct. Families opened tiny workshops, often with fewer than a dozen workers, and they produced simple goods. Over time, workshops blossomed into full-scale factories, and Wenzhou came to dominate certain low-tech industries. Today, one-quarter of all shoes bought in China come from Wenzhou. The city makes 70 percent of the world's cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of Wenzhou's economy is private.

The Wenzhou Model, as it became known, spread throughout southern Zhejiang Province. Although nearly 80 percent of all Zhejiang entrepreneurs have a formal education of only eight years or less, the province has become the richest in China by most measures. The per capita incomes for both rural and urban residents are the highest of any Chinese province (this excludes specially administered cities such as Shanghai and Beijing). Zhejiang reflects China's economic miracle: a poor, overwhelmingly rural nation that has somehow become the world's most vibrant factory center.

We're a bunch of lazy, entitlement-due, layabouts and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would fight and die to preserve this culture.

As for the Canadian border, just another example of maybe good ideas and intentions badly managed by the powers that be:

A globe-trotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the U.S. by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said Thursday. The inspector has been removed from border duty.

The unidentified inspector explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely "discretionary," officials briefed on the case told The Associated Press.

I bet when they send in the suicide small-pox carriers, they'll still look healthy too.

Again, maybe good intentions, but just more and more bad executions. Time to pull the plug on the inept in power today. Maybe tomorrow's clueless will be better. One can only hope. Hope is the only thing left in our worthless existences.