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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> blatant violations of fair trade, huge import taxes on foreign goods, great firewall blocking any foreign purchase easily, hugely subsidised mail, forced ownership sharing, lowered safety regulations, lack of pollutant regulation

'Free' trade benefits industrialized nations, while mercantilism benefits developing nations. Every currently industrialized nation has, at some point in its past, been incredible protectionist, blatantly violated IP laws, had atrocious safety, employment, and pollution regulations, and large taxes on foreign imports.

China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through.

Are you expecting them to look at the history of how the United States, and Europe developed, and go: "Well, gee, protectionism, lax safety regulations, and access to foreign resource markets worked really well for all these other countries... But we shouldn't repeat their success!"

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>China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through

in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it

I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses

Yeah they shouldn't follow that history.

The US also had slavery.

Great, so now that you're at the top, you want to pull the ladder up?

Are we talking the slavery ladder?

I'm talking about all the other 'unfair' trade practices that have been cited.

If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them? Would that be a more palpable alternative?

Earlier today, a study was posted on HN about how the British Empire plundered ~$50T (inflation-adjusted) of wealth from India over it's colonial history. If you want to even the playing field with the developing world, we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.

I think reparations are the way to go.

> If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them?

We are, it's called the global economy, and it has performed a wealth transfer of unprecedented scale these last decades.

> we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.

Colonial reparations are complete crock, because they are based on counterfactual history speculations, and there are absolutely no concrete limits on those.

The Roman empire obviously plundered the British isles for inflation-adjusted astronomical amounts during its colonial history, should modern-day Italians pay reparations to England?

It's absurd.

Arguably, had the Romans not invaded and expanded, much of the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe would have remained 'barbarian' for quite a while. They arguably brought civilization with them into the far-reaches of Europe (obviously at a great toll to the local populations)..

Arguably, the British brought a lot of things with them to India as well, infrastructure, medicine, industry, language. All these things benefit Indians living today, and many millions of Indians living today wouldn't be alive if the course of history hadn't been changed.

How do you put a value on that?

Also, many Indians were killed resisting the colonial invasion, and their descendants are not living today as a result, but would have if the course of history hadn't changed.

How do you put a value on that?

You can twist yourself silly arguing these things back and forth, because there are no physical limits. There are no principles to fall back on, there's only human imagination, you're free to dream up whatever pricetag you want on them.

And that is why colonial reparations are ridiculous.

You can start the negotiations. If things are ridiculous, bring them back to earth.

"Your grandfather's grandfather owes me money"

Where do you go from there, exactly?

Well, African Americans were enslaved, but were also taught valuable skills in cotton agriculture. Having carefully weighed the pros and cons of the two, we've concluded that slavery in the United States was a net wash, and, if we were to repeat the experiment again, slaveowners should not owe their slaves any reparations.

> infrastructure

Infrastructure that was paid for, and built by the people of India.

> medicine

Then why did life expectancy in British India go down during the colonial period? And why were millions of people dying in famines, all the while British India was a net exporter of food, to the rest of the empire?

> industry

How did countries that did not get colonised ever manage to industrialize?

> language

What, did Indians communicate with eachother through chest-thumping, and grunts, before someone had the bright idea of teaching them how to speak English? Christ on crutches... This reads a bit like satire.

> Arguably, the British brought a lot of things with them to India as well, infrastructure, medicine, industry, language. All these things benefit Indians living today, and many millions of Indians living today wouldn't be alive if the course of history hadn't been changed.

India's share of the world economy went from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India's GDP (PPP) per capita was stagnant during the Mughal Empire and began to decline prior to the onset of British rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...

Recent history reparations wouldn't be absurd. For instance, the US should start with the American Indians and then the African slave trade.

How about Russia returning the wealth of the Ukrainian people, the Jews, Tuvans, Tatars, Lithuanians,etc? Will you do the numbers please?

If "pulling the ladder up" includes things like "not allowing the world climate to be destroyed" or "preventing disregarding human rights violations and worker quality of life" then, yeah, probably.

Giving each country a fair shot at developing even if they didn't happen to get on that ramp at the same time as some Western countries is a good goal.

At the same time, that's not such a vital principle that we should sacrifice other moral or pragmatic imperatives to get it. China may have gotten a late start, but that doesn't give them the right to ignore everything we've learned since then about a country's obligations to its people and the world.

The US also had slavery.

Are you under the impression that China didn't?

I was and I stand corrected.

I was trying to address the idea that since the US did bad things in the past, it's ok for other nations to do them too.

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