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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Our current world system is based on exploitation by the powerful on the weak. It has been this way since the dawn of time at many levels. So now, powerful countries take resources from less powerful countries. There are many ways this can be done, so here we are.

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Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan have very little in the way of resources, but economically they do very well.

Free markets!

I wonder if there is an example of a country that doesn’t have resources, so “powerful countries” cannot “take” them?

Or every country has resources, and weak countries are those that prefer to sell them for cheap rather than work on making use of them?

England, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan, etc. None of them have vast natural resources.

England had coal at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

England adopted free markets which started the IR.

So true. There is a full powerful - weak spectrum. Those not at the top or bottom, in-between ones, turn a blind eye to this and accept it as a harsh reality of nature, enjoying spoils of this chain in the process. Worse, become servile to those above them and ruthless to those below. And as if this were not enough, doors of fashion philanthropy also open up for them!

what makes a country weak?

Who did Singapore exploit to get rich? Taiwan? Korea?

You could be forgiven for believing that if we didn’t have literal real-world experiments in the 20th century where countries went from dirt poor to rich without doing any of the shit you think makes countries rich.

What’s most offensive about your virtue signaling is that it helps keep people poor. If we had kids in college studying how Lee Kuan Yew systematically made his country rich, instead of studying fucking socialism, you’d save literally millions of lives.

Korea was propped up by the US due to the Cold and Korea Wars. Taiwan due to the cold War too. Both are still being supported by the US. Singapore was owned by the UK and was ignored left alone due to the fact of its size. So it was able to chart their own course.

If the U.S. could make a country rich by propping up its military Egypt and Pakistan and several others would be first world countries. Korea and Taiwan are rich for the same reason China is getting rich. The only difference is Korea and Taiwan followed a capitalist model starting in the 1950s and 1960s, while China didn’t start until the 1980s and 1990s.

I am not talking about rich, but exploation.

The US kind of exploits Korea, Taiwan for cheap labor.and goods. Pakistan was on/off a US ally, same for Egypt. Both at different times were aligned with USSR/Russia, bouncing between the US and Russia over the decades. Plus they are used by the US as a balance against other countries in the mid-east

If US “exploitation” can make a country rich, why isn’t Mexico rich?

Exploitation is to make the exploitor rich, not to make the exploitee rich.

But from what I understand Mexico could be a bit better off then it was decades ago.

But looking at history, the US took big chunks of land from Mexico in the 1800s. The resources from that land made the US what it is now. So in another time, Mexico and the US could have been completely different if that did not happen.

So just circling back to the Korea example, does this imply that in the Cold & Korean wars, South Korea was exploiting the US to become rich? What exactly does the word "exploit" mean to you here if the US had to cross an ocean and to get themselves exploited by some minor power?

> The US kind of exploits Korea, Taiwan for cheap labor.and goods.

So we had a period where Korea was exploiting the US, then the US somehow broke their chokehold and started exploiting them? And if the Koreans improve their standard of living that mean they've regained exploitation dominance over the US? Or is Korea exploiting someone like the Chinese (a nation that I, naively, feel is a bit stronger than Korea)? Or who are they exploiting?

I'm not sure how this plays out to be internally consistent. It seems like being wealthy has more to do with internal policy than external exploitation or even resource availability.

I do not say anywhere Korea Exploiting the US. I am saying the US and a few other nations used many countries to gain power and use that as chess games against each other. Without US support, S. Korea and Taiwan would not exist. The US is/has used these countries against China and the USSR.

Yes, they got better off due to it, but the US gets a bit more benefit from the arrangement. Fun fact, until about the 1980s, N. Korea had a much stronger economy that S. Korea due to support from the USSR.

this is cope. no continent has received more assistance than Africa. they are the opposite of exploited.

A huge fraction of that assistance (e.g. the IMF) has been conditioned on opening up their economies to "fair" foreign exploitation. It's not some benevolent gift, generally.

There's always an excuse.

It's extremely naive to ignore the power dynamics that set the terms of who benefits from those investments, and the relationship between those power dynamics and the initial wealth of the participants. I'll withhold judgement on whether it's "cope".

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