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Comment by adamson | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the article made a value judgement about price protections

It didn't, it was more of a poke at New York Times. They have harsh language for any form of US protectionism whatsoever (some of their arguments are certainly justified mind you), but not a peep when talking about India.

Its a good point, if you overlook the fact that the British destroying the Indian & Chinese economy (through war/invasion) created a vacuum for the US economy (British colony at the time) to flourish.

So the US closing up trade at this point is immoral from a historical perspective and shows an obscene level of hypocrisy when compared to what it has promoted for the 50+ years post WW2.

Never forget India was #1 in world GDP (for more than 1000 years) pre-invasion.

> Its a good point, if you overlook the fact that the British destroying the Indian & Chinese economy (through war/invasion) created a vacuum for the US economy (British colony at the time) to flourish.

You're making some sort of moral argument, but the argument against protectionism isn't moral. Protectionism is stupid from an economic perspective, no matter if India or the U.S. does it. If there's a moral argument to be made, it's against protectionism: It denies citizens to partake in free trade and therefore makes them poorer.

What's in it for India if everyone has to use the (inevitably crappier) Indian version of Google, Facebook or Amazon? It's not like anybody outside of India is going to want to use that stuff, so it doesn't bring in foreign capital. It'll just reallocate local tech talent to a domestic market that is less profitable than the international market. It makes no sense.

That's exactly why people need to bring in emotions and hot words like "colonialism": To make a psychologically powerful (but irrational) case. It might just work.

> Never forget India was #1 in world GDP (for more than 1000 years) pre-invasion.

I'd be skeptical about estimates on GDP dating to 1000 A.D., but if there's anything to learn here it's that you should probably spend some of that GDP on defense, lest you get invaded by tiny-old Britain.

Do not quite agree on this one. The USA, Canada, Australia, and South Korea were also colonized, and they did quite well.

>"Its a good point, if you overlook the fact that the British destroying the Indian & Chinese economy"

I only mentioned Britain because I followed it by compounding China and India.

If we are only talking China specifically, it was invaded by a mixture of 8 nations simulataneously (multiple times), including British, Americans, French, Germans, Russians and the Japanese in just the 19th century (see Opium wars through Boxer Rebellion).

> So the US closing up trade at this point is immoral from a historical perspective

This is not a statement which should be made nor accepted without sound reasoning to support it.

Why should any given historical event have moral relevance to decisions today? From when do we start? Why?

Second, history is almost always far more complex than such arguments assume.

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