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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

China cleverly identified America's Achilles heel: the greed and shortsightedness of its oligarchs.

Give them an extra 5% profit and theyll sell out the entire country and reduce its industrial base to ashes.

  So what if they're technologically superior? What we can't steal, we can buy.                                                                      
  When the time comes to geld the Yankees an' hitch them to the plough, we'll cut
  off their balls with a knife they competed to sell us

-- Under the Yoke (1989)

many of them genuinely believe that it is progress to be above mere national interests. Certainly many people believe it to be a more progressive point of view.

Not sure if it was a naive new world order belief, blinding greed, racism, plain stupidity or a mixture of all of that. But the end result was selling the American people down the river..

there was an element of drinking their own kool aid. the economic religion of the late 90s and 00s was the theory of (static) comparative advantage vs export oriented industrialization.

China was only shooting itself in the foot, it was argued, by not opening its markets fully and following export oriented industrialization.

profit margins dictated economist opinions though. This is why EOI was treated as quaint while TOCA was treated as gospel truth even though one was nonsense.

There was a belief in "the end of history": that any economy that developed would inevitably become a liberal free market democracy.

I think this has left its mark. A lot of people do not seem to be able understand that this is not true. Even if they accept it intellectually its such a fundamental assumption that its still influential.

I think there was, and is, an element of racism. It still persists in that a lot of westerners cannot comprehend that they can be overtaken technologically or threatened by non-western societies. This includes people who think they are not racist, or are anti-racist.

I think the “end of history” idea was sold to the public in the same way and for the same reasons they were sold trickle down economics.

Totally agree on the racism. I do hope the West doesn’t learn that lesson the hard way.

And who gives the oligarchs power if not a populace that prefers cheap goods to expensive ones, no matter the real cost?

All this talk about evil corporations selling out the west reminds me of the leftists "50 companies do all the pollution" bullshit. Who buys products from those companies? Who rewards lowering price at all costs?

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