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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Looks like though this is the future. It's Capitalism where you love a product, say freedom of speech or democracy, but the company that supplies it gets bought out. And now you can't get that product anymore because it's not a part of the new company's corporate strategy. It's the same thing really. All these companies get bought out by the Chinese. Same thing goes for natural resources and the environment. They are just being bought out. Get things you need while supplies last.

It would be interesting to see Trump pass a law prohibiting any US company from doing this... from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

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> from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

How would it be decided that they do it to support China and not, say, to cater to an outraged domestic group that makes noise? Will that become a game of "connect the policy change to China in five hops or less" to determine whether it's against the law?

I'm not a huge fan of capitalism, but it's a bit of a stretch to call this situation a failure of capitalism when the whole debacle exists because the Chinese government is making demands of Apple, which is not very capitalist. It doesn't really make sense to attack the ideology using an example where the ideology isn't really in practice, unless your point is that capitalism fails because it isn't flexible enough to work in a world where it does not reach 100% adoption. If so, fair enough, but I think that same criticism applies to every other economic system.

What if on the other hand this is the fundamental aspect of Capitalism... Where the people with capital are always telling other people who might want access to whatever they are holding, money, markets, production, whatever, that if they don't kowtow they won't do business with them. And no one talks about it, just like no one talked about all the Chinese hacking so as not to ruin their reputation and anger China.

First of all, it's not a capitalism-issue. Pre-capitalism, any smith could've told you to take your horse elsewhere if they didn't like you.

> just like no one talked about all the Chinese hacking so as not to ruin their reputation and anger China.

I feel like that's a bubble issue. I'm not particularly interested in the latest "China hacks XYZ" stories and I see them all the time. If you have the impression that nobody talks about them, I think you might need to read more main stream news, they do get a lot of play.

I don't mean currently no one talks about China, I mean there was a period after 2009 where there were a number of hacking incidents that no one talked about until much later.

As for a Smith refusing, yes, that could be the case. But there was no consolidation of power and industry as there is in Capitalism. So you could easily find many other Smiths to help you with whatever you needed. Going forward there are many specialized industries many of which are extremely consolidated. So you can't just go to someone else they own a whole spectrum. And that also makes it much easier for China to shut down things, as they could blacklist a whole set of businesses not just one.

> So you could easily find many other Smiths to help you with whatever you needed.

I don't think that's accurate. The world expanded a lot since then, you can now buy online, order something from across the world etc, but you couldn't do that 200 years ago. If you were in bad standing with whoever sold what you needed, you'd have to go through a lot of trouble to source it elsewhere.

I'm with you that nation states/blocs need to make sure not to rely on foreign companies for key industrial needs. It's why I consider Europe's reliance on US IT companies a problem. The US will make sure they don't depend on China, so I'm sure that there will be at least two choices in the foreseeable future. Just make sure you don't piss off China and the US simultaneously.

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