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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

This article is painting mobility as a bad thing, but it also has a good side. China's capital controls are a big part of how it oppresses people: if they could just leave, China would have no ability to make itself into a productive dystopia. The ideal situation would be if countries had to compete for everyone's presence, but as it stands limitations on mobility mean that only the very powerful can leap over the boundaries and have countries compete for them.

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Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would).

The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.

The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.

Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.

The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for:

1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.

2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)

A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.

For some context in case anyone was curious, it seems that approximately 1 in 30 of people worldwide live outside the country of their birth. (Of these, approximately 1 in 10 are forcibly displaced.) Also, "the largest international migratory flow from a single country of origin to a single country of destination is the 12.7 million Mexicans living in the United States"; this flow alone is approximately 1 in 600 people worldwide.

https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/de... https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/internation...

You seem to be talking of closed borders, not capital restrictions.

Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.

Western nations have used capital controls to oppress people. The Nazis, for example, used capital controls to both oppress people and to help fund their war machine via monetary policy.

e.g. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...

Capital controls don't rule out freedom, nor rule in oppression. I doubt you'd suggest Switzerland, the US, Britain and the rest were oppressive by mere dint of having capital controls before Bretton Woods was destroyed.

Giving the Nazi example of an oppressive regime being oppressive doesn't change that - they were oppressive via nearly all the other tools of free democracies too. Property seizures and taking away all freedom of movement was far more symptomatic of being oppressive. OP's China example is a place that is oppressive in many ways, but far from being one of the main means of oppression, capital control has been liberalised hugely in recent years. Freedom of movement, to emigrate, to demonstrate, etc on the other hand...

A billion people can't "just leave". Even 10 million people can't "just leave" - look at Syria for example.

It only takes the margin leaving to give oppressive policies a sting.

Really that easy huh. Why don't you ask Meng Hongwei if it's that easy, or may Fan Bing Bing if it's that easy.

When your government is willing to torture and kill you in order to get their way, and they are willing to do it on foreign soil, it doesn't seem so easy, or safe.

The majority of people have no interest to float around the globe without any ties to their home or culture.

The idea that this cosmopolitanism of the elites is something that the average person even cares about is a fiction peddled to maintain the status quo. If you look at the rise of populists around the globe, are they nationalists or are they hyper-libertarians who want to give John Doe the ability to move to Swasiland?

The productive 'dystopia' you're talking about isn't China, it's West Germany in 1960-1970. As the article points out, the world under Bretton Woods had strict capital controls, was everyone in the Western world living in a dystopia? Obviously not. And by the way, the average middle class person in China these days isn't exactly living under dystopic conditions either.

I absolutely don't see how taking control away from elites, restoring capital controls and national autonomy and reigning in global capital is dystopic. It was the primary development model for any country on the planet whose general population, and not just elites, are prosperous.

You're conflating physical and wealth mobility.

This is purely about wealth mobility for people with >$50m net worth.

People who got it through corruption at best and genocide at worst (literal genocide in a case I know in NY). The average Chinese or Russian citizen will never have the chance to move their money abroad because they have none, they will never have the chance to move themselves because legal immigration is expensive.

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