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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

You’re making a very good point here. We’ve always known that malign forces of various varieties will exploit the vulnerable in society, and we’ve definitely experimented with trying to imprison every last one of the vulnerable sucked into criminality. The War of Drugs has pretty definitively demonstrated this strategy doesn’t work. Poverty has been a national security issue for some time.

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Just wait until you realize that the reason we have “national security” is because they are protecting a system that impoverishes americans and the world. North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist counter example. That’s a crime and it must be slandered.

This is why this line of argumentation is at once true and will never be persuasive: the poverty is the point of our economic system. That’s what they’re protecting. If Americans were all relatively equal, the economic royalists would have no throne to sit on.

> North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist

You've got to be kidding me.

America has a Gini coefficient of about .42 [1]. The last time North Korea's was estimated, it was around .82. To to put that in perspective, the inequality gap between America and North Korea is well more than double that between America and the Netherlands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in... 2023

You should read up on the Korean War.

Here’s an accessible resource: https://blowback.show/

Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?

> You should read up on the Korean War

To learn that we went to war with North Korea because it's communist? No shit. We also did that with Russia, China, Vietnam and a good fraction of current NATO members, trade partners and allies.

> Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?

Elites? Most Americans have unfavourable views of communism [1].

But you didn't say communism. You said socialism. And it's a bit ridiculous to argue (a) North Korea is run as a socialist economy or (b) that we have a beef with Pyongyang, today, because of how it runs its economy.

[1] https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/

I don't have a beef in this discussion but I just want to point out that if you want to quote a source, then quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move. They label all WW2 Nazi casualties by the Soviets as "victims of communism" so not exactly an objective and truthful source.

> quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move

I’m citing the YouGov poll they commissioned, but fair enough.

it is kind of befuddling that they had a working system that gave people the marginal quantity to not rebel and even that was too much for them. Even then don't carry water for NK as some sort of utopia. America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was.

We are capitalist. The fact that you doubt this means you are misinformed on basic facts.

America's homeless population is because of America's land use policy, which is pretty communist. Or rather, it runs on "economic democracy" - no matter how much money you have, you can't do what you want with your land unless all your neighbors agree with it enough to change the local zoning policy. Which means you can't build low-cost multi-family housing on it.

That's democracy and not communism?

It doesn't work, so it must not be communism.

A charitable interpretation is that it is a form of democratic control of wealth (neighbours decide what you do with your land) rather than individual control of wealth (building however many stories you want on your own land), and democratic control of wealth is definitely closer to communism than individual control of wealth

Yes, I agree. extending that logic, democracy in general is closer to communism, than to oligarchy (extremes on either side, ignoring feudalism ), but its not communism. I simplify the "isms" with communism - socialism - democracy -capitalism - oligarchy , extremes at both ends generally not good to society at large.

??? What country would let rich people do whatever they want with national territory? In any case, you are complaining about other landed people. The renter class and homeless are considered non-persons.

You’re right it’s not like we have a leader that unilaterally decides what companies live or die or what mergers get approved based on who pays him off.

Or the same leader doesn’t unilaterally raise tarrffs, exempt companies that bow to him and tell other companies not to pass cost increases on to customers.

That doesn’t seem like the free market to me.

Capitalism != free market. It means private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism naturally tends towards monopoly due to competition. Companies go out of business, competitors buy up their remains, and consolidate market share.

What is happening politically is a reflection of this concentration of power that naturally accumulated due to the dynamics of capitalism (and as they rose they influence the state to enable further concentration, also part of the natural life of actually existing capitalism).

In new markets, capitalism looks pretty good and the competition drives good deals for consumers and the barriers to entry are low. This devolves over time into a highly concentrated market with high barriers to entry. We've seen this story in our industry time and time again. Unfortunately, the new market state is transient, and the concentrated part is steady state. This is why people are always looking for new market opportunities.

None of these companies that Trump is pressuring not to raise prices in response to tariffs are in any shape form or fashion monopolies, duopoly’s are any other type of “opily”. They are the car manufacturers and grocery stores and retail stores which have not been a monopoly in our lifetime.

And by “our” industry I assume you mean tech.

Which one of the tech companies is a “monopoly”?

There is nothing I can use Google for that I can’t use another company for and with Google Search, it isn’t even the best.

Amazon? I can order most things from other places or go into a physical store.

Apple? I can buy one of hundreds of different phones or computers

Microsoft? My life is completely Microsoft free.

> America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was

America has its wealth more evenly divided than North Korea does. America has never been communist. (And North Korea doesn't organise its economy according to Marxist-Lenninist principles other than running a command economy.)

It's so sad that that the US is such a poor country and that its leaders refuse to learn from North Korea on how to become richer

The US has attacked North Korea constantly economically and killed 20% of its population in the 1950s. It economically supported South Korea. You are complaining about the results of this attack. In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south and the US stepped up support to prevent capitalism from looking like shit.

The US did support SK, e.g., by giving it "most favorable nation" trading status, but NK had supporters, too, in the USSR and China.

>In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south

-- according to statistics published by the DPRK.

The USSR no longer exists and China has only recently become strong enough to offer similar kinds of supports (which doesn't mean that it does in fact do so). China was an agrarian society until basically the past 25-35 years.

I’d rather be poor in the US, than rich in North Korea. And I wouldn’t wish “poor in the US” on my enemies.

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