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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

And environmental protection laws, and human rights laws, and civil rights laws, you name it, globalization has effectively undermined.

The best lie that America ever told the world (best exemplified by the 1939 World’s Fair[1]) was that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. But when the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on buying cheap goods from China, it became clear that the Western world - the only long term bastion of democracy - cared more about capitalism than democracy, and China showed the world that you don’t need democracy for capitalism. Democracy has been in decline ever since, along with human rights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_New_York_World's_Fair

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This may be an unpopular opinion here but it's spot on.

> when the U.S. blinked after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre and kept on buying cheap goods from China

The US did very little trade with China in 1989, though more than a few years earlier. I don’t think Tiananmen Square or its response says much about US internationalism or commitment to whatever abstract principles. You can draw much stronger conclusions from them about internal Chinese politics.

What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen? Serious question. Military intervention would have been absolutely out of the question. U.S.-China trade back then was very small, so the U.S. had no leverage. The U.S. could not have armed a guerilla either. There was really nothing the U.S. could do about China in 1989.

> What could the U.S. have done about Tiananmen?

Impose Cuba-style sanctions on China until they held free elections. It may not have changed their policy, but it would at least have shown we were serious about it. And knowing what we know now, it would obviously have had significant economic consequences over time.

That was basically US policy toward China in the 50s–60s. It was utterly ineffective.

US policy toward Cuba had much bigger impact because Cuba is a tiny island next to the North American continent, and being cut off from your obvious larger trading partner is more severe.

The US sanctions on Cuba didn’t have anything to do with free elections though, and their primary effect was entrenching the Cuban government while impoverishing the Cuban people.

> US policy toward Cuba had much bigger impact because Cuba is a tiny island next to the North American continent, and being cut off from your obvious larger trading partner is more severe.

The US is China's largest trading partner and the relative size of China's economy was much smaller at the time. Moreover, other democratic countries could have adopted the same policy which would have given it real teeth.

And the sanctions did nothing to entrench the government. The government was already entrenched. If the people there don't like the policy then they know how to end it -- change their government.

I believe that was parent poster's point, that there didn't seem to be much that US could have done. Hence it would seem suspect to draw much of a conclusion from as proposed by GP.

You did catch that I used the word “lie”, right? I am under no illusion about the darker sides of U.S. history.

Its not that Socialism & Democracy as a combination was not tried. The Pre-1991 India is a good example, it also had War on Poverty and whole enchilada. Nothing did more to get millions of people out of abject poverty than 1991 economic liberalization.

There are many socialist concepts you might implement. If you consider nationalized healthcare, then the vast majority of all western countries are socialist democracies.

This is why it's weird to hear people bring up gulags in the US--most "democratic socialists" are just trying to catch up to europe.

> are just trying to catch up to europe.

Implying Europe is somehow "ahead." (They aren't.)

Not sure why you’ve been downvoted. History from the 1990s onwards seemed to demonstrate that past a certain point, democracy becomes an obstacle which Capitalism has to overcome or devolve into crisis. If anything, the US is hemming more towards the authoritarian technocracy of China than away from it.

Absolutely. If you look at it in a game-theory sort of way it becomes obvious that capitalism proliferates in its most efficient manner, not in favor of other values like democracy, or the common good etc.

Rules aren't rules, rules are further obstacles that capitalism as a large evolving system is there to evolve around. Most of what we see as rules are only suggestions if you've got enough capital, or things in place to prevent tragedy of the commons: capitalism is not 'commons-alism' and not there to support the system on which it runs. If the entities maximizing capital get to amass more, as far as capitalism is concerned that's the whole point and everything is working optimally.

We assume we can get new workers, a new planet, whatever, because capitalism sort of processes through any such thing in order to reduce it to abstracted value that's assigned to whoever competes most effectively for it.

Of course democracy is orthoganal to this system.

I think in the end everyone gets pwned by Capitalism.

"Social Conservatives" often champion free markets while at the same time those free markets destroy social norms in order to open new markets and increase market utilization (LGBT industry, eschewing traditional gender roles in favor of a world where everyone works "like a man" and everyone can buy cosmetics "like a woman", etc...).

Socialists get bought off by cheap entertainment and a subsistence level of welfare, cutting their hopes of mobilizaing the working class off at the knees.

Social Justice Warrior types get support insofar as they promise to increase labor participation and drive down wages (this is how Diversity and Inclusion is financially justified), but in the end they will at best just succeed at integrating new people into the corporate structure without really making any grand changes to society at large.

List goes on. No one has been able to control capitalism with their ideology.

It does seem to be the paperclip maximizer of ideologies.

Sure, China was a bastion of prosperity before even a perverted model of capitalism (please don't call it free market capitalism) was introduced (sarcasm). Beside what makes "democracy" a good thing anyway? Protection of rights has nothing to do with it.

That's a point that deserves some consideration. But there's something that always bother me when people start talking about China:

Always keep in mind that China is a rather poor country. It's per-capita GDP has just passed above Brazil, and that's mostly because Brazil is facing the biggest crisis in its history. When you claim that China is a successful dictatorship, always remember that it's successful only from some points of view.

In 1978, China had about the same GDP per capita as India. Today, China's GDP per capita is more than double that of India. China's economy has dramatically outperformed many democracies over the past few decades. Whatever you might think of the Chinese regime, they're clearly doing something right.

Some cities are richer than New York. China is more like the Americas: Massive differences in wealth from one place to the next.

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