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Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

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Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#141
post #136
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying the people of China have 'chosen not to choose' is bizarre and disingenuous - you are twisting the notion of freedom to imply Chinese people have chosen not to be free. The Chinese people have never in recent memory chosen the Chinese communist party to represent them exclusively.

as opposed to the illusion of choice provided in de facto two party "democracies"?

Yes, there's a world of difference between being able to choose from one option or 2.

As to the choice being an illusion because two parties often rule: tell that to the Whigs (one of the two parties that no longer exists in the UK), or to anyone that's held a balance of power in a coalition government.

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "free trade" the US propagates is horrible for anyone not in the top 20% of society. Your manufacturing business has been decimated, many people outside coastal areas have been seeing declining standards of living. Even the EU has many import tariffs to protect its own industries from unfair competition from China and others. Why should someone who makes bikes in the EU compete with someone who does it for $0,50…

Most peaceful era per capital in human history. Lowest percentage in poverty in human history.

Where have the biggest reductions in poverty taken place?

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#143
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government goes to war\implements policy 1. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1. People continue criticizing. The government starts war\implements policy 2. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1 and war\policy 2. People continue criticizing. ...

Forward slash (/) is punctuation in English. Back slash is not.

My eyes have been seeing a lot of Windows local file paths lately. Nothing that a couple of days of Linux\FreeBSD cannot cure.

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#144
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the market access point, to an extent. There an assymetry that can't stand forever, given the size of China's economy today. But, free trade has never really been free. There are tons and tons of caveats, exceptions, special rules and bad faith. So, I think it's misleading to represent china as "closed" and other countries as "open." On the second point, I disagree. IP is not some basic, natural law. It's…

> IP is not some basic, natural law. It's a relatively recent invention, ostensibly invented to promote certain economic incentives. Why is china morally obligated to respect it? > At any given point in time, the biggest effect of an IP system is how it affects the current portfolio of patents & copyrights. That's what tends to dictate the rules. When copyright law is updated, it's the impact on Disney's IP asset por…

Wasn't it the case that Facebook, one of the biggest American companies, bought Onavo precisely to spy on other tech companies and steal their business?

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#145
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US does this, but I'm glad it's a country where we value being able to openly criticize our government for it. We have an independent judiciary, democratic institutions--what are structural Separations of Powers which is the most important structure of a civilization consistent with liberty. China doesn't have that. Saying the US also cheats the rules, too, is important, but shouldn't be confused with the reality…

The government goes to war\implements policy 1. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1. People continue criticizing. The government starts war\implements policy 2. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1 and war\policy 2. People continue criticizing. ...

Really? We are currently disengaging in Syria. We left Iraq. If people had cared that much about leaving earlier, we would have left earlier because they would have made it an important issue of a campaign. A couple people criticizing it do not change policy. This is the flaw of the tyranny of the majority, which is why we are set up to allow more power to state and local governments.

Of course, Iran is now threatening free trade through the straits of hormuz. Would you call intervention to protect free passage "toppling foreign governments" because they "make decisions we don't like"?

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#146
post #141
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as opposed to the illusion of choice provided in de facto two party "democracies"?

Yes, there's a world of difference between being able to choose from one option or 2. As to the choice being an illusion because two parties often rule: tell that to the Whigs (one of the two parties that no longer exists in the UK), or to anyone that's held a balance of power in a coalition government.

current choices are between different shades of the same colour. it ultimately does not make a difference, it is an illusion

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Milton Friedman says that because he's a policy advisor of countries that benefit from others dropping their protectionist policies. Friedman has been called many things but inconsistent or unprincipled were not among them. He advocated for free trade for the same reasons free trade is the overwhelming consensus of economists; it works and they can explain why whether you want the verbal or mathematical explanation…

> Friedman has been called many things but inconsistent or unprincipled we’re not among them. Yes they were, for example Friedman said that free market policies enable 'freedom' and socialist ones do lend themselves to authoritarianism, while conveniently ignoring the fact that in almost all places where his vision was put as fully into motion as possible, (70/80s Latin America), it had to be accompanied by severe st…

You’re saying you dislike or hate his principles. I get it. I hate Dick Cheney and Hilary Clinton’s principles but I don’t claim they don’t have them. If someone says “war” they don’t need to hear more, they support it. Noam Chomsky is deeply principled. If someone opposes the US he’ll support them, whether they’re the Khmer Rouge or the Serbs in the Yugoslav Civil War. Lenin was principled. He believed in Communism and he wasn’t going to let any opposition, real or imagined, get in its way. He was a true believer, just like Milo is a true believer that he should be rich and famous.

Consider another great economist, Joan Robinson. She supported Mao and the Cultural Revolution to her dying day[1]. That’s principle. When you look on morality and abandon it because your politics are more important you’re showing your principles. That’s consistency.

Regarding the “shock doctrine”, a phrase that appears nowhere in Friedman’s voluminous writings others have covered this ground at length.

> The Klein Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Polemics

> Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine purports to be an exposé of the ruthless nature of free-market capitalism and its chief recent exponent, Milton Friedman. Klein argues that capitalism goes hand in hand with dictatorship and brutality and that dictators and other unscrupulous political fig- ures take advantage of “shocks”—catastrophes real or manufactured—to consolidate their power and implement unpopular market reforms. Klein cites Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, Britain under Margaret Thatcher, China during the Tiananmen Square crisis, and the ongoing war in Iraq as examples of this process. Klein’s analysis is hopelessly flawed at virtually every level. Friedman’s own words reveal him to be an advocate of peace, democracy, and individual rights. He argued that gradual economic reforms were often preferable to swift ones and that the public should be fully informed about them, the better to prepare themselves in advance. Further, Friedman condemned the Pinochet regime and opposed the war in Iraq. Klein’s historical examples also fall apart under scrutiny. For example, Klein alleges that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was intended to crush opposition to pro-market reforms, when in fact it caused liberalization to stall for years. She also argues that Thatcher used the Falklands War as cover for her unpopular economic policies, when actually those economic policies and their results enjoyed strong public support. Klein’s broader empirical claims fare no better. Surveys of political and economic freedom reveal that the less politically free regimes tend to resist market liberalization, while those states with greater political freedom tend to pursue economic freedom as well.

https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/bp102....

[1]https://chinachannel.org/2017/12/13/fellow-travellers-tale/

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#148
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it scary that you get downvoted for saying something you can find in an economics textbook.

Read a macroeconomics textbook written more recently than the 1970’s and it will call the infant industry argument theoretically plausible and reference Krugman’s paper on industry clusters. It will spend far more time on the globally optimal and not strategically effected strategy, free trade. We know protectionism can theoretically work. It can also be a massive failure, like in all of post-colonial South Asia and…

There has been a big push to normalize the idea that "macroeconomists have figured out x and y". However, macroeconomists aren't scientists, and their messes like the Reinhardt-Rogoff affair should make everyone skeptical that they can claim they "know" anything with any degree of certainty.

I first encountered this when economists kept attacking rent control saying it destroyed cities, while Montreal remained the best place to live in all of North America.

Then I found this interesting essay about economists finally getting to try out an experiment about sweatshops in Africa, and concluding "Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong":

> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lif... > > In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories where our sneakers and T-shirts were made, and opposition to sweatshops surged. But some economists pushed back. For them, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty. > >As the economist Joan Robinson said, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” > >Textbook economics offers two reasons factory jobs can be “an escalator out of poverty.” First, a booming industrial sector should raise wages over time. Second, boom or not, factory jobs might be better than the alternatives: Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages. Factories may also have incentives to pay more than agricultural or informal market work to persuade workers to stay and be productive. > >Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.

Never blindly trust an "economics textbook" lol. When you disagree with them, economists say "read a textbook", and when you point out the models are bad, they pivot to "it's just a textbook, real models are much more complex than that" (they tend not to be).

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#149
post #145
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government goes to war\implements policy 1. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1. People continue criticizing. The government starts war\implements policy 2. People criticize. The government continues war\policy 1 and war\policy 2. People continue criticizing. ...

Really? We are currently disengaging in Syria. We left Iraq. If people had cared that much about leaving earlier, we would have left earlier because they would have made it an important issue of a campaign. A couple people criticizing it do not change policy. This is the flaw of the tyranny of the majority, which is why we are set up to allow more power to state and local governments. Of course, Iran is now threateni…

>> If people had cared that much about leaving earlier...

It really does not matter. US of A could never prove the existence of WMD in Iraq. In fact, all of their claims have been proven to be wrong. Millions dead. People who started the war are enjoying retirement sipping on the costliest wines.

Re: Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

#150
post #53

As someone who watches the very unusual moderation of China-critical comments on HN (+3 one moment, -3 a few hours later) I'm wary of a political piece praising China hitting #1 on HN. I also don't see the value of Singapore - which is openly anti democratic ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/singapore-challenges-democrac... ) providing advice here - as the same concerns about authoritarian corruption that apply to Chi…

I worked in Singapore in 2016 and in my exploration of various neighborhoods I did not see abject squalor, as seen in East LA, West Chicago, etc. people seemed employed and happy.

BTW, your comment on moderation is interesting.

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