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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

With the threat of a US company like Facebook coming in and taking over their economy, I can see why.

Yeah, I'd bet on that whole FB thing to come to a screeching halt pretty soon. The Africans have been smitten by the allure of the Chinese protectionist model. One of the biggest mistakes I saw when I was in energy was how we were not providing Africa with a sufficiently attractive alternative model. All the Africans were about was, basically, "Money talks and BS walks." And the Chinese system just looks so attractive because of all the money, and how many poor people they've lifted, and yada yada yada.

Ever try to compete with a dream? And it's good for people to have dreams. Don't misunderstand me. I think we in the West need to offer Africa an equally attractive dream. Because right now all we've been slogging the past 60 or 70 years has been "democracy will make your life better". We shouldn't be too surprised that they are starting to run off the reservation.

How about offering them the dream of the rule of law? Arbitrary enforcement of capricious legal codes is the biggest hurdle keeping the people, and hence the economies, of these countries down.

Rule of law is another one though that no one really has. The best you can say is that there is a spectrum. And on that spectrum you have a place like, say, Norway, where only a very few people will get preferential treatment. And on the other end you have places like EG, where arbitrary treatment is essentially enshrined in law in the personage of the head élite.

You could argue we don't even have rule of law in the US ourselves, since we definitely live in a place where laws will be enforced against some but not others. At least we have the democracy we've been trying to sell them on. So in the case of slinging democracy, regardless of what you think of the health of our own democracy, we're able to give a message consistent with deed.

China just sent its police force into Vanuatu to extract 6 people (mostly Vanuatu citizens) who they claim broke Chinese law. These people were deported without trial.

This comes after they did the same last year in Fiji, when they kidnapped and flew out 77 people without trial.

African nations had better be careful. Their sovereignty is at risk.

https://asiapacificreport.nz/2019/07/08/secrecy-veil-over-de...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/336583/77-fraud-suspects-...

> China just sent its police force into Vanuatu to extract 6 people (mostly Vanuatu citizens) who they claim broke Chinese law.

The title for one of your sources says that they were Chinese nationals:

> Secrecy veil over deportation of six Chinese nationals raises key questions

As if that's the significant point. You don't get to just kidnap your own citizens no matter what they've done. (In this case, the local cops participated. That still doesn't make it right. Extradition and deportation should go through the courts.)

Isn't that basically the Patriot act they have in the US?

I've responded above.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you unfamiliar with the concept of dual citizenship?

Their nationality outside of the State of Vanuatu is irrelevant. They are Vanuatu citizens, had not been charged with a crime in Vanuatu. Countries don't just deport their own citizens.

My point is that the situation is much more grey than you're painting it. From what I've read about the situation, it was the Vanuatuan authorities themselves who arrested the six suspects. The Chinese government merely filed a complaint. They were then deported back to China, escorted by Chinese law enforcement. Many countries (including the U.S) assert that their laws apply to their citizens even when travelling overseas.

Also, all of these suspects are Chinese nationals who applied for Vanuatuan citizenship. Four out of six of them were granted citizenship. One out of the four forged his criminal record check form in order to obtain citizenship [1]. It sounds as though they were trying to use Vanuatuan citizenship as a shield against criminal deportation, which clearly the Vanuatuan government wants no part of. Vanuatu has been quite blatant in citizenship-for-money exchanges [2][3][4] in recent years and many Russian and Chinese crime syndicates have been taking advantage of this.

In addition, all of this has been done with the explicit cooperation of the Vanuatuan government, legally, under Vanuatu's Immigration Act which gives them the right to deport without notice [5]. All this is not to argue that there should or shouldn't be some kind of due process, but it's far from the extra-judicial kidnappings which you are insinuating. I would view it more as an informal, case-by-case extradition treaty.

[1] https://asiapacificreport.nz/2019/07/05/some-detained-chines...

[2] https://www.economist.com/international/2018/09/29/selling-c...

[3] https://fortune.com/2017/10/10/vanuatu-accepts-bitcoin-for-c...

[4] http://dailypost.vu/news/sale-of-vanuatu-passport-degrading-...

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/radio-australia/programs/pacificbeat/...

I think rule of law is supposed to be about non-enforcement of non-existent rules rather than enforcement of existent rules? i.e. the rules you have to follow are those codified in the law, rather than whatever e.g. the executive happens to declare. You lose rule of law when they start to impose different rules rather than when they merely decide not to impose the ones in the law.

Otherwise... who wants to live in a world where e.g. every single jaywalker gets fined? If you require enforcement of existent rules, you reduce rule of law to something that pretty much nobody wants, rendering it a pretty poor concept to define in the first place.

>who wants to live in a world where e.g. every single jaywalker gets fined?...

I don't know? But I'd bet you could sign the vast majority of people up for a world where every single child rapist goes to prison.

But debating behavioral extremes as we did right there is useless. The real issue is whether or not all people are treated equally under the law? If all people aren't, then the law does not rule. Those people who are above the law rule.

There is no such thing as part time rule of law. Again, the best you could do is put it on a spectrum. This one is more rule of law oriented, this one is less.

It's like being pregnant. A girl can be further along, or less far along in her pregnancy.

But I mean really, she can't call herself a virgin because she didn't do doggy. That's not really how virginity works.

> But I'd bet you could sign the vast majority of people up for a world where every single child rapist goes to prison.

Depends how many innocent people also go to prison, doesn't it? At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved" and at the other end you have China's pragmatic take that a few broken eggs is the price of an omelette.

>At one end of the scale you have Benjamin Franklin's "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved" and at the other end you have China's ...

But you're still arguing at the extremes and evading the central question of whether everyone is treated equally under the law. If the law rules, then everyone will be treated equally under it. Yet we find that in nearly every place on Earth, the law does not rule, because not everyone is treated equally under it. (And I only say "nearly" because I'm not 100% sure that there isn't some society out there that treats everyone equally. I'm 99.99% positive there is not, but I've not been everywhere in this world. But I'm 100% sure we don't have such a system in the US, because I'm an American, and I know America.)

All that said, even debating the extremes, I mean, how many times you see some old black guy getting out of prison after 31 years or whatever because he didn't do it? You say, "See! He got out. So there must be Rule of Law!" But that's not how it works, because if there was Rule of Law, it would have been illegal to put him into prison in the first place. It was not.

So again, we, ourselves, don't practice the whole "...better 100 guilty persons escape..." maxim. You can say, "Well, there are racial complications." or "Well, there are financial issues that go into legal representation too." or etc etc etc. But that's the same as saying that the law is not paramount.

Gerrymandering, regulatory capture, and a massive and growing class gap want to talk to you about this "Democracy". (not to be construed with being pro china by any means, but I think we can set our sights a little higher than the current sh*t show)

If the solutions presented all seem to be more regulatory capture and information/market asymmetry for the big companies with gov connections, I’d rather not.

The thing that has exploded in size since the 1960s no one talks about is the size of nation states across the western world and their direct involvement in countless markets. From education to big banks to defence contractors to Boeing, they are some of the worst examples of mixed state-capitalism and a great way to become wealthy while providing little value to the population.

Not to mention the explosion of private equity in gov projects leeching off tax payers. We need less mixing of the big players with gov force and have either public companies (ie public health insurance) or markets. The direction the US is going in by continually mixing the two has done little to help the “little guy”. Yet the markets and rich get all the blame, but there’s no way universities can charge 4-20x more for the same product without cheap gov backed debt, nor the housing market boom that generated tons of poverty.

Agreed. My preference would be smaller gov, no subsidies, no tariffs (tied to subsidies), worker co-ops (democracy in the workplace solves class gap).

TFA mentions the big problem with "enforcing" this agreement is that the infrastructure is so poor, it's physically hard to just trade the good directly.

There's a hierarchy of needs, and only China is contributing (not without return) on the bottom parts.

Free trade helps to build the roads and infrastructure needed. The cost of building roads needs to be paid for, if it isn't worth transporting things from point A to point B the road is pointless. As the cost of trade goes down it self-reinforces by making people willing to contribute to better infrastructure. Of course when the road doesn't exist at all sometimes the investment to make the road is too high for people to realize that it is worth it.

China contributing is potentially a good thing (or potentially bad for reasons others have debated). This trade zone doesn't need their contribution to be successful, but it helps.

The rule of law comes when people try to protect their properties. It is hard to apply when you have nothing to lose. If you want to apply it from the top, you will need a dictator to do that. Take Chinese IP issue as an example, there are more and more laws to protect IP (of course, still not as good as western standard), the reason is that Chinese companies start to develop their own IP, and they need to protect them. The same for private properties, there was no law before 90s I believe, now people own things, their properties will be protected.

The Chinese model fundamentally works. The globalisation model is probably horrible for these countries, what do they have to offer ?

Even cheaper labour than China. For now.

I'd be more worried about China - https://www.google.com/search?q=china+buying+africa.

I think that Facebook's less of a threat than it would like to be.

Actually China is the reason I believe Africa has a real chance of success in the future. China knows how to develop, and it needs a market, and a strong African economy to continue fuel China's growth. You can be all hippie about how to make the world better, but in the end, it is just sweat and tears. And China knows it.

China will devour all that Africa has to offer, leaving nothing in its wake but authoritarianism and decay into perpetual poverty.

Africa can offer to be a great economy and help the world growing. History will tell. When British went around and loot the world, no one would think they would represent human rights standard now, right?

I don't believe that they do represent a human rights standard.

They've spent decades eroding their education system, they're increasingly moving towards the privatisation of state assets and services and their media largely consists of a great propaganda machine.

No non-African country can claim they will bring Africa into the modern world without vested interests. The best result for Africa is if they can achieve some general stability across the continent without puppet governments backed by foreign governments that will sell themselves short. Saying choose your master doesn't resonate well with the freedoms we cherish.

Things like this take time to organize. Surely it must have predated the libra thing?

I upvoted this comment and it went back to grey immediately, and I wonder how the people voting this comment down are want to explain themselves, what counter-arguments they care to offer and what their motivations are because the Facebook currency question and its relationship to economics in Africa are not mutually inflammatory topics of discussion--it absolutely needs to be talked about and highlighted.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48882301

> counter-arguments

There wasn’t an argument to counter, it was a throw-away piece of hyperbole. It didn’t vote either way, but I can see people down-voting simply because it looks like trolling.

If you want to make a proper argument about Facebook taking over African economics, go ahead. But so far the main ‘argument’ seems to be that it must be evil, because Facebook.

The original comment I replied to, when I replied to it seems like it was edited by the poster and--as written, was asking what the Facebook currency could portend for emerging economies in Africa. I found it odd that the question would get pushed so far down into almost invisible greyness.

As it's written now a lot of that focus and nuance is gone, which is a shame because it was a very good question IMO.

You realize that many people in Africa still live in huts without electricity? Facebook currency being widely used in Africa is no more absurd than asking all Indian citizens to receive all their income via a bank account.

Don’t need electricity to get cell service mate. Most people have mobile phones even if they live in a hut.

And they charge their phones how exactly? At work? Using solar panels? I've also seen roma communities in Europe that live in huts but almost every one of these huts as a sat TV antenna and an illegal electricity connection. But what happens when your village doesn't even have an electricity infrastructure?

Meanwhile, the first time I was ever in a livestream - on facebook, no less - was on a hike outside of Abuja in Nigeria...

“Many people in Africa live in huts”

This might blow your mind to hear but the continent of Africa is comprised of many countries, several of which have had electricity for a long damn time, my friend.

Some even have, wait for it, CITIES. That people live in. With houses made from brick. And internet access. The fast kind even!

You'll have to do better than acting as if Africa can be sufficiently defined by its least developed nations.

Or, at least, you should have actually read the link--at least then you would have seen how the "many people in Africa live in huts" line isn't really a helpful assertion to the discussion the rest of us were trying to have about Pan-African economics.

There is a lot of voting manipulation that occurs on HN (despite the best efforts of the HN crew and algorithms). Facebook actively manages its public image and that extends here as well. Mainland China does it too. And there are many others. /tinfoil

Please don't make such claims unless you have a good basis for them (this is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). They're corrosive to the community, and usually there's nothing more to it than that people saw comments on HN that they strongly disagreed with. In such a case it often seems like there can't be any reason why someone would post such things in good faith, so they must be fake—but of course that isn't evidence, other than of the topic being divisive.

I hear you regarding conjecture though I believe it is important for people to be skeptical of what they read. People have become more aware about this regarding the Main Stream Media and Amazon and Yelp reviews over the past few years but this perspective is also needed when reading things like Wikipedia and HN.

Facebook as a threat to Africa? What the hell?

Maybe it is a threat to the African states. Not to the people, though.

Africa is poor thanks to statism. Not due to some "evil american corporates".

> "Africa is poor thanks to statism. Not due to some "evil american corporates"

That can be rectified. It could very easily be poor thanks to both.

very reductive to say that africa is poor due to statism and not centuries of imperialism, both actual and economic

The point, that I pray you aren't missing by being deliberately obtuse, is that for as bad as things may be today it's possible for things to become worse. And giving American corporations free reign to run social experiments in Africa, like creating their own currency, is a quick path to discovering ways to make it worse.

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