Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FooHentai | Hacker News Reader

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And yet, in a weird way it's working in a way that aligns to wider, long-term, individual interests.

By making the government the controlling monopoly, China ends up with a form of capitalism where externalities apply to other countries rather than surrounding corporations and citizens. That's kinda interesting compared to how most other capitalist nations are handling their shit right now. You can do 'common good' stuff like force meme EVs on a significant national scale, where other developed nations are absolutely floundering.

What's even more interesting is how rapid that has occurred as compared to how recently China was an absolute polluting demon. Still are, but the rate of change/velocity towards addressing it is worth paying attention to.

> where externalities apply to other countries rather than surrounding corporations and citizens

Not according to the devastated ecosystem, flooded archaeological ruins, and 1.3 million people once living around what is now the three gorges dam.

But those costs may have been worth the benefits. We weren't part of the decision-making committee, so we don't know what factors were weighed. It certainly doesn't look like an obviously bad decision to me. There was a big loss, there was a big gain... which one was bigger, I don't know sitting here 10,000 miles away.

This is kind of similar to how the USSR industrialised in the 1930s. Western nations were simply stunned at the rate of change, and while we now know it was underscored by unspeakable atrocities, it still applies that such a tightly controlled economy can be very agile and responsive to threats such as climate change.

A tightly controlled economy is better able to do whatever the leaders are interested in. The capitalists response is yes, but a less regulated economy gets there only a little slower anyway, while because it is trying more things it can get to something better instead. It is easy to see what we gained by whatever was done in the past, but it is hard to see what we gave up because we didn't choose to do something else.

Assuming the best ideas can get funding.

Of course. However your have a better chance because whoever funds the best idea gets the rewards for doing so. It is chance in the end.

This falls down when the costs are things like environmental externalities though, because the companies exploiting these make more money despite producing less overall value for society.

The atrocities were very much avoidable and unnecessary though.

Yes, while reading the Gulag Archipelago about the forced labor camps and how people would be worked to death or freeze due to inadequate clothing, it definitely seemed the atrocities held back faster progress rather than promoted it. If they had been more humane they might've industrialized even faster.

>On a weird way it's working in a way that aligns to wider, long-term, individual interests.

Only so much as the interests of individuals align with those of business and the state. Anything threatens stability (e.g. individual freedoms, business models that allow people to circumvent state authority) is a threat to the state and to business by proxy and is struck down.

Completely agree. My post is by no means a love letter to the CCP. Rather, an observation that in some aspects the marked difference in corporate/government relationships between China and most western nations is producing some synergies between the state and individual interests which we don't see elsewhere.

It's called national socialism. Nobody wants to say it but modern China has essentially copied the economic system of Nazi Germany. Capitalism is simply a tool to be used rather than some great ideal of free markets and competition. You can see it by the way they criticize the US for protectionism while actively being the most protectionist country on earth.

The way EV's have been forced is similar to how Hitler created Volkswagen, the People's Car. Hitler wanted an affordable German made car for the German citizens.

They've copied it right down to the extreme ethnic self-interest if the Muslim concentration camps are any indicator and the fact that foreigners aren't allowed to own companies in China. Also copying the seizing of neighboring lands.

That is an apt analogy even if most people aren't going to be able to process and discuss it earnestly. You can extend the analogy even further with China's approach to social engineering, they actively pursue the censorship of content they deem socially harmful (such as pornography) as much as they pursue the censorship of dissident political content.

It's interesting to see an authoritarian government use tools normally associated with poltical oppression to enforce social mores. Whether you believe those social mores are positive or not doesn't really matter to the part I find interesting and that is the questions and moral quandaries posed by the use of such powerful tools to ostensibly change society for the better. That is a subject that has gone completely ignored and undiscussed in the Western world. That's concerning because we're watching a live demo occur in the world's most populous nation but no one is talking about it.

None of that is new, though; the social liberalism of Western countries is a relatively recent and localized aberration. Censorship of socially harmful content was and is very common, particularly in more religious countries (which describes basically all for most of history, and many nowadays).

I'd say that's the fascist and corporatist roots of Nazism, rather than Nazism itself. Franco, Salazar and such were all critics of liberal capitalism as well, and market participation within their countries was heavily controlled and managed.

Of course, all countries are to some extent. The US government wanted cheap mortgages, so it created Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac; it wanted cheap education loans, so it created Sallie Mae; it wanted a strong internal agricultural production, so it created the Farm Credit System; etc. And the EU is certainly not lacking in such mechanisms.

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