Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese government is a horrible, authoritarian nightmare, but still somehow does better at managing the country's resources than the American ruling class. The pandemic, now over in China, while our nurses tape garbage bags to themselves as thousands die daily, has proven that definitively.

View on HN

Australia and NZ are dont have an authoritarian govt but still managed to get the pandemic under control.

Yes? The U.S. did worse than them too.

So you dont need an authoritarian govt to bring it under control. You just need a govt and a population who will listen to scientists and experts.

> Australia and NZ are dont have an authoritarian govt

a lot of people would disagree here, see the (correct, based) coup of the aus govt over the judiciary allowing them to at will deport migrants, or the controls on going outside in australia

The pandemic happened to hit while we had a particularly idiotic populist demagogue in the White House, but even if we'd had someone more competent I still agree that China would have done better. Assuming you believe their numbers, China seems to be doing better than most of the world.

I chalk up China's governmental competence to the number of scientists and engineers involved in their government. It may be authoritarian and a bit of a nightmare, but unlike the majority of other governments in the world you have a few decision makers in there who have some clue how the world actually works. Most other government are run by lawyers, career bureaucrats, delusional ideologues, or leaders who inherited their position either officially via some line of succession or de-facto via institutional nepotism.

There are some of all those categories in China's government, but there are also apparently enough people who actually know how to do things in the real world.

Right, I was just responding to the question, whose posing is often used to suggest that the US is the best of all possible resource allocation worlds. I don't want to live under a regime like the CCP, but we did just run this experiment and the U.S. system of resource allocation failed miserably.

I don't think it's the best of all possible worlds, but it is better than some.

Only a small percentage of billionaires do incredibly valuable things, but those who do are doing things that I can't imagine the US government of today ever doing. The US government would be having meetings to schedule the meeting to discuss the meeting schedule, or fighting over culture war issues.

You don't think that the culture war issues are manufactured to distract the masses from endless war, tax cuts, corporate subsidies, etc?

I think that the government has been sabotaged. Intentionally impairing it's functions to justify the critiques of functionally.

"I want to make the government small enough to drown in a tub"

"Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it"(that one's a joke but conveys the point)

Theres not that many billionaires, so I'm not sure how relevant percentages of billionaires is

We need to remember they allocate resources horribly in other places though. Genocide is going there, forced abortion and sterilisation of entire populations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25304738

This might be a relevant story I read today on China.

Plenty of our democratic leaders have made idiotic self-serving decisions concerning the pandemic too (I'm looking at you, Nancy Pelosi)

I don't think she's ever been a scientist or engineer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com