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Comment by hackandthink | Hacker News Reader

"David Graeber: Oh, absolutely. After all, the alter-globalization movement grew out of a broad global reaction to the Washington consensus, which was never any sort of consensus, but rather, a vision of the world forcibly imposed on the global South through the third world debt crisis. I was involved in “drop the debt” campaigns of various sorts since at least 2000. What got me interested in some of the philosophical issues I ended up ex- ploring in the book was the peculiar moral power of the notion of debts. So many oth- erwise sympathetic people, even when told of the terrible, almost unimaginably inhu- man suffering inflicted on people in the global South because of the depredations of the IMF, would still respond, “well, that’s terrible that so many children died slow and painful deaths, but still—surely one has to pay one’s debts!"

https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/debts-history-im...

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Of course, the US is widely known for repossessing airports[1], seaports[2], and railways[3], then displacing local workers by flying in your own people. That totally happens all the time - its just that US biased media hiding it from you. The era of this kind of lazy anti-Westernism is over, China is only out for itself, and it will drag countries into its sphere of influence any way it can. "But what about this american thing?" I don't really have the time or need to respond to the thoughts of an "American anarchist activist" which is in all likelihood a nice euphemism for foreign agent or useful idiot.

[1] https://www.africanliberty.org/2018/09/10/like-zambia-sri-la...

[2] https://saharareporters.com/2021/11/26/china-takes-over-ugan...

[3]https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/kenya-ch...

This is a very humorous comment for you to have made. OP posted a quote from David Graeber that precedes China's Belt-and-Road plans by years. Graeber was instead writing about the West's use of debt to further exploit the global south, and how debt has long had a supposed moral dimension that makes renegotiating it (in the literal and metaphorical sense) exceedingly difficult.

As someone who sporadically did political organizing with David Graeber, I assure you he was sharply critical of US policy as it pertained to exploiting developing countries. He also happened to be a professor of anthropology at Yale and the London School of Economics. How you have determined he was a "foreign agent or useful idiot" is curious. But I know David would have found it as funny as I do.

I don't see how you can drag someone's credentials to prove he isn't a useful idiot. Malcolm Caldwell, famous for being the very embodiment of a useful idiot was a research fellow at UCL.

Other defenders of the Red Khmers had even more impressive credentials. Need I remind you who was the writer of "Distortions at Fourth Hand" and "Manufacturing Consent"?

By definition, all useful idiots have impressive credentials. Without credentials, they are not useful.

> Other defenders of the Red Khmers

Are you talking about the entire Western block where in the 80 when western powers brought support to the milicia in order to piss off the Soviet Union-backed Vietnam, or what?

> How you have determined he was a "foreign agent or useful idiot" is curious.

That's easy. Generally speaking, anyone who is critical of empire-building is seen by that empire's apparatchiks as a "foreign agent or useful idiot."

The criticism doesn't come from any position of principle, it's just us-versus-them tribalism.

I share your animus against China, and, lacking the original context, I can see why the post you replied to looks like a defense of China, but I did not interpret it as such. Simply a correction of the too-often-ignorance of the IMF.

US Imperialism is even more brazen than that. Here's a video of the US President commenting on how US troops are in Syria "only for the oil": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U10p3Tn9V5Y

This is the same guy who suggested injecting disinfectant or "bringing light inside the body" to cure covid. He also continues to lie about his election loss in a desperate attempt to cling to power. Trump is shameful, but he doesn't represent the long history of the US.

"the long history of the US."

You mean, the long history of overthrowing governments, imperialistic wars and debt-trapping entire nations into selling their state-owned assets to US interest groups and funds?

Your memory may be short lived, but there are many of us who know and remember.

And, by the way, China hasn't started invading random countries all over the world...yet.

> And, by the way, China hasn't started invading random countries all over the world...yet.

Bhutan, India, and Vietnam would have a word.

Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libiya, Syria and about 70% of Latin America.

I spent just 2 minutes for this. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Trump didn't start syria, though. Obama did. In fact (while I don't like trump). AFAICT he is the first president in a very long time to not invade a new country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Natural_Rubber_Compa...

> In May 2006, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) released a report detailing the state of human rights on Liberia's rubber plantations. According to the report, Firestone managers in Liberia admitted that the company does not effectively monitor its own policy prohibiting child labor. UNMIL found that several factors contribute to the occurrence of child labor on Firestone plantations: pressure to meet company quotas, incentive to support the family financially, and lack of access to basic education.

> Beginning in March 2019, the Washington, D.C. based Center for International Policy funded an investigation into alleged labor and environmental standards violations by Firestone in Liberia, culminating in publication of the February 2020 report, "A Bridge Too Far: Social and Environmental Concerns in Bridgestone's Liberian Rubber Plantation and a Plan for Remediation."The report details labor rights violations of Firestone's collective bargaining agreements with the Firestone workers union; Firestone's failure to honor pension payments for retired Firestone employees; and, Firestone's contamination of local watersheds resulting in elimination of fish and natural wildlife.

Sovereign borrowers are free to default on their debts. This is just a business decision, not a moral failing. But once they default they shouldn't expect more loans from the IMF or anyone else. The IMF was never intended to be a charity, and there are other international programs for distributing food aid to countries experiencing famine.

The Government already has a monopoly on force and steals our money under the threat of imprisonment in the form of taxation: Now that money is supposed to be allocated into risky investments for abstract, unmeasureable benefits like "soft power," for the benefit of people somewhere else? That creates resentment here. It also infantilizes the Global South.

How much better would it be if we eliminated the IMF, shrank government, and lowered taxes so individuals could freely choose how to benefit the Global South via nonprofit giving? If people don't give voluntarily, why should they be compelled to give in the form of taxation?

I feel like Graeber, an anarchist, would appreciate a decentralized solution like that instead of trying to handle this from the top down.

The view that "you have _your_ money and then the government takes it away from you" ignores that without the society that you are inserted in, the very concept of money would be meaningless. More accurate to say is that part of the social contract for participating in a society that enables you to """make""" that money is that you have a pay a "fee", i.e. taxes (among other things, e.g. abiding by laws which are democratically decided, etc).

Society is a mutually beneficial arrangement. I agree that you should be able to "opt out" and live in a homestead way out in the forest, and that if you do so you should be exempt of taxes. But unless you live in a Kazynscki cabin, that view makes no sense.

Sure, there are some beneficial things that the government does. Like roads, police, fire, regulatory agencies; all the usual things that are cited as "We live in a society" line items. But those things are a tiny minority of government spending.

The VAST majority of the federal budget goes to entitlements. Another massive chunk goes to paying interest on debt because we spent money we didn't have on entitlements. An similarly large chunk goes to defense (Which you could make an argument for, except the VAST majority of which is not actually used for defense, but intervening in far away conflicts)

So going back to all the "society" items, well, the roads, infrastructure electricity, basic services, police, clean water, airports; all the stuff you really need for a society: They're a tiny, minute sliver of the money the government takes from us on a regular basis. You could reduce taxes by 90% and still provide everything you need from a functional society without the parasitic drain on the economy.

"Entitlements."

The real parasitic drain on the economy is the large accumulations of capital that prevent the Invisible Hand from manifesting. Being alive is an inelastic good. If people have to choose between starving to death or labor for scrip to use at the company grocery, it breaks the efficiency of the market at valuing labor.

Dollars are the scrip and the government is the company store, only accepting dollars (they control) for the protection racket.

The government is both wasting too much money feeding poors who that guy wants to labor or die, and also at the same time forcing too many people to labor for no gain because of whatever thing you're imagining here.

I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but that's how you get people (mostly children and old people) starving in the streets.

That's what those entitlements pay for.

Maybe you think that's not worthwhile, fair enough. Unfortunately for you, many of your fellow citizens and taxpayers disagree.

It's quite possible taxation results in more starvation than it prevents. Particularly when used to incentive low income fertility and dis-incintivize production and labor.

Huh?

Like, that is an extremely strong claim and I'd appreciate if you could provide some evidence for it.

Or, perhaps the 60% of American Households that give to charity would be able to take their increased pay, and more efficiently get help to people that need it than a series of large, fraud-ridden government programs.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If western countries are not setting up credit facilities, someone else will.

It might be predatory private entities looking to get their hands on state assets, or it might be the Saudis or Chinese looking to exert more political power.

If we want to seal ourselves off from most of the world and stop trading or participating in regional security arrangements, then this is a reasonable approach.

I think people underestimate how much of our material wealth in the west is reliant on these trade and security arrangements.

Countries like the United States can pursue a North Korean model and try to produce everything domestically, but the standard of living is going to plummet.

If taxation is theft, why don’t you move to Somalia or start a cartel in a remote region of Mexico and live there? Or perhaps there are benefits you are receiving from living with a functioning government?

Ah, the classic "if you don't want the money robbed from your wallet why don't you just leave town."

True colors emerge.

It's not the monopoly on force, it's the monopoly on the claim to the legitimate use of violence, from Max Weber:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36317559>

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