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Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

China and Poland has definitely got it better with less communism, but what is "more or less capitalist"?

I also notice that you completely ignored my reply.

I ignored the rest of your reply because I specifically used China and Poland as examples. The relevance of Sweden in the 1800s is unclear to me and you didn’t tie that to the comment chain. People on HN sometimes have this tendency to throw up a bunch of unrelated citations that have nothing to do with the main point, then expect the replies to address each one.

I agree that everything can’t be summarized as a simple cause effect, but the parent comment I replied to was about comparing capitalism to communism, hence my usage of examples of states that went from communist to capitalist. In other words, this isn’t theoretical. We have examples of a capitalist state succeeding, when it was formerly communist.

Again, Sweden in the 1800s is not particularly relevant here.

It was me that was doing that comparison, agree it is not a perfect one because of many reasons, one is that communism is a political system that has an economic system (typically planned economy) and capitalism is an economic system only. Thus you can run a brutal dictatorship, like the communistic China, or benevolent democracy with capitalism.

And this is what I don't agree with the reasoning in this thread, it is a comparison of apples with oranges. Many proponents of capitalism does this error, they assume that capitalism gives political rights somehow, and they typically talk about things like freedom and such. But all of those political freedoms stem from somewhere.

And an continuation on that argument is that private companies a free to do what they want, when in reality private stock companies (in the West at least) has a separate legal entity and reduced liability as a guarantee from the state. Is that true capitalism?

Why I made the comparison between capitalism and communism is that both proponents of those systems usually reply "That is not real communism/capitalism!" about any flaw in these systems (which of course happened in this thread as well). But if every flaw is always theorized away, does it then only exist in theory?

If we look specifically at China for instance we can notice other things that has helped it, one is that greedy capitalist from the West moved industries there, China is also doing industrial espionage on Western companies, China as also aggressively spikes its currency, and it balloons it's GDP numbers by building ghost cities.

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