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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

It is wildly amusing to watch capitalists get their lunch eaten at capitalism by communists.

It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law. If the allegations from the article are true, there was probably tortuous interference, bribery, criminal threats, as well as a whole slew of broken consumer protection laws at the very least.

What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that? I really don't understand what kind of world people who make statements like this want to live in.

It's amusing to see the (perceived) David beat the (perceived) Goliath. It's not neccesarily fair, or nice, but punching (perceiv-ably?) up is funny.

Anyone who perceives Chinese sellers as David when it comes to e-commerce hasn't been paying attention for at least a decade.

Most capitalists don’t believe in rule of law, only rule of “the free market”, at least when things are going their way.

We're all capitalists here, I suspect - I mean does anyone in this message thread - a single person - advocate for state ownership of all means of production and then centralised controlled distribution of goods and services? I didn't think so. I think the term you're looking for is laissez-faire capitalists, of which there could be a few. Most people support some degree of regulatory control.

We should stop with "you're either an X or a Y". That might be true on TV or on Twitter. It is not true in real life.

Sorry, you only yet to be a capitalist if you actually own the means of production. Otherwise you're just a wage slave with Stockholm Syndrome. And yeah, there is at least one person in this thread that unambiguously supports state ownership of production. If that isn't you you get to rationalize the consumption of non-renewable resources in a finite system for production of utterly fatuous bullshit like the fitbit-for-your-dong (I can't be assed to look it up).

Ah... the internets...

Read the first line, thought "How could they be so wrong?".

Then read the second line, thought "Oh... you got me, that was a funny joke".

And now thinking "Oh... maybe they're serious, which would make this an hilarious case of 'do what I (maybe?) say in real life, not what I do on TV, Twitter, or HN' "

Good to see a capitalist standing up for regulation of marketplaces for once..

I'm not sure what the confusion is here. Capitalism is not anarchism. Capitalists generally recognize the value of contracts, do they not?

They also recognize the value of circumventing or wholly ignoring environmental protections laws, labor laws, anti-trust laws, taxation etc...

> What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that?

The US does this all over the world. They will just cut off entire countries if they don't follow their banking rules, for example.

> It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law

The exact same companies that were lobbying against consumer protection and antitrust laws, unions busting, and convicted of conspiracy to supress wages, are now asking for government to step in because Chinese competition is breaking the same laws.

Definately some hypocracy and now that the shoe is on the other foot, people they shafted previously are enjoying some shaudenfruede.

*Schadenfreude

This dude who designed a massage gun did all that? Busy boy!

That's a complete misunderstanding of situation.

Except it really isn't. US-led multinationals and their investors were all dead-ass certain that they were going to devour China economically, totally ignoring the culture has a track record of swallowing invading armies and ideologies whole that spans thousands of years.

The problem is that law enforcement doesn't work. If instances of fraud were actually investigated and properly policed, then this wouldn't have happened.

If Amazon was threatened with closure if they don't fix this, you would see a change quickly.

They don’t even need to be threatened with closure. You just need to be able to eliminate the “it wasn’t us it was our partner merchant” defence for liability on their site and the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards.

China may be communist by branding, but they're economically capitalist, and on a governmental front, mercanalist. Common ownership is not a thing, and it's all about pushing locally made and exporting as much as possible by all means necessary.

Aha, so all-eating capitalism without having healthy limits set by socialism.

I don't disagree on any particular point, I'm just old enough to remember when none of what you mention was the case, and American corporations were gleefully eyeing China as their next market expansion target. Without exception they got out-played at their own game.

I feel at least Apple has done pretty well in China.

Probably because they dont sell on Amazon.

Apple does sell on Amazon, though perhaps indirectly. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Apple/Apple/page/77D9E1F7-0337...

I think there is more to their success than that though.

Interesting, I don't seem to be able to see any Apple store in the Amazon UK site.

Uhh how is that iphone Foxconn plant doing these days?

Sure, and the IP transfers required to make that happen played a huge role in modernizing the Chinese tech/fab industry. So even that represents a phyrric victory from a nationalist-industrialist perspective.

They definitely stick their hand in the free market a lot.

China is the land of cheap counterfeits and it started before Amazon existed.

Everyone is a capitalist these days. Capitalism won over the world decades ago.

No, most people are wage labourers who work for capitalists. In the same way that most people in 12th century Britain were serfs who worked for nobles. The difference is that capitalists have managed to convince workers that they somehow occupy equal positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

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