Just a friendly reminder that China is still much worse than any flawed democracy when it comes to freedom

Just a friendly reminder that China is still much worse than any flawed democracy when it comes to freedom

Just a friendly reminder that less evil, even if true, is still fucking evil.

Why? Why would ending protectionism necessarily demand competition?

Right now, corporations get off w/ light fines and their execs don't face jail time because of the explicit and implied protections in our legal system. Companies can declare bankruptcy without reaching into the pockets of those w/ a significant interest in the company because of financial protections, and prosecutors very rarely pursue criminal charges for something done in a business context. The larger a company is, the less likely it is to fail, but also the less competitive it is, because it can just buy legislators to block competition.

Here's the current lifecycle of a corporation:

1. small, scrappy startup w/ an innovative idea
2. medium corp that expands its product line to corner a piece of the market
3. large corp that buys out competition and lobbies to raise the barrier to entry
4. mega corp that strategically uses subsidiaries to compartmentalize risk to not suffer consequences for bankruptcy

At step 2, companies are vulnerable to scrappy startups, but by the time they get to step 3, it's too late to hold them accountable since they can just drown them out w/ negative press, lawsuits regarding regulations (and few consequences for trollish suits), etc.

I believe that if we cut corporate protectionism (say, for anything 2 or above) and hold execs legally liable for harm their products produce, we'll largely stop the flow from 2 to 3 and largely force those at 3 and 4 to improve their behavior. You wouldn't get situations like Boeing since the execs responsible would've been in jail at the first instance and the rest would follow for subsequent instances.

Our current strategy seems to be to pass regulations to improve the behavior of corporations, but corporations naturally sidestep the law and pay off legislators to make the consequences small. Instead, we should be making it unprofitable for corporations to lobby legislators and hold them accountable w/ law enforcement and the judicial system. Make laws extremely simple so there's no wiggle room, such as if your product harms someone and you knew enough to have prevented it, you go to jail and need to make full restitution to the injured parties, and anything you earned while working there is available to make that restitution (smaller companies would have protections, but also limitation on how much profit they can pull from the corp).

In short, make it extremely unlikely a company will get powerful enough in the first place. The smaller a corporation is, the more protections it should get, not the reverse.

For example, items listed on Amazon that sell moderately well, Amazon creates knockoffs for. They then sell them at a cheaper price under the “Amazon Basic” name until the original is gone, and then they increase prices. This is what the free market looks like.

I haven't seen those originals disappear, and I've heard a ton of complaints from people about the low quality of many Amazon Basics products. The only ones I've personally found value in are their rechargeable batteries (basically rebranded Eneloop) and their mice (backup only, they suck to use), but pretty much everything else has been poor quality.

People are the important thing, not companies

Agreed. I do think that employee owned companies are the ideal, but they're not the only way for a company to be structured.

How people choose to organize themselves is their business, the government shouldn't be picking and choosing structures it prefers. However, we've pretty much done that w/ the legal structures around corporations.

My solution here is to tear down the existing corporate structures and only have some kind of legal protection for sufficiently small orgs. For example, if your org has 50 employees and makes under 50M/year in revenue, you can apply for federal asset protection in exchange for submitting to regular audits. You would be disqualified from those protections if your net worth is above some amount, if you own a substantial stake in some number of companies, etc. The intention would be to give small companies some amount of protection so people actually want to start them, and once you start seeing success, then you're expected to buy your own private insurance or whatever and do your due diligence to make sure your operations don't harm others.

I would also like to see civil lawsuits be dramatically reduced in favor of actual criminal prosecutions. So if you're being discriminated against or harassed at your job, you would go to the police and they would investigate and potentially arrest your employer, instead of going to a lawyer to seek a settlement from the company. The former gets results, the latter is a high enough barrier that most don't bother.

Improving the lives of people should be the end goal, not profit.

Neither should be the end goal, the goal should be leaving people alone so they can pursue happiness on their own. The government shouldn't protect me from making poor choices, and it shouldn't prevent me from getting rich, it should prevent me from being taken advantage of and ensure I have whatever basic necessities I need to pursue happiness on my own.

I think we need some form of government, but I think that form needs to be very focused on providing limited, high quality services. Instead of welfare and retirement programs, just give poor people cash, whether young or old. Instead of complicated IP protections, let the courts deal with the general idea of "fraud" and "theft." Instead of laws that say behavior must be within certain guidelines, prosecute actual harm (e.g. no tickets for "speeding," but prosecute "reckless driving" heavily, as in actually endangering others). The government should only step in when absolutely necessary, and otherwise leave people alone.

In all honesty, the role of a legislator should be very boring, most days they should do absolutely nothing. We don't need full-time representatives, we should have regular people that assemble whenever something truly important comes up, like maybe a few times per year or so. If the legislature doesn't have enough power to favor or disfavor a given corporation (i.e. it doesn't consider enough bills to matter), the corporation won't bother lobbying them.

I think that sort of approach can self-correct and result in bad corporations failing and good corporations succeeding, because the financial and practical risk of bad behavior is high enough to discourage it.

Obviously, I haven't dealt in specifics at all and I represented it in fairly extreme language to make a point. The idea I'm trying to convey is that I think less is more absolutely applies to the government, and we should strive to simplify it to where it's transparent enough that the average person actually understands what government does.

One thing I'm noticing in these comments, and in a lot of comments threads is the "well yeah, duh. Everyone already knew that" and while I'm definitely in that camp and have done that myself, I am starting to wonder if there is danger there.

Like, this is a significant breach of privacy and trust and the kind of thing that we should be up in arms about. But we already assume the government is doing the worst movie villain shit imaginable, so when we have evidence of it we shrug it off as just another Tuesday.

Yeah, waters wet. We should still be alarmed when we see a puddle of it somewhere it shouldn't be. (I don't know if that analogy actually tracks but I'm sticking with it).

My position is that people are selfish because they're raised in a society that rewards selfishness. There's always going to be outliers but that's the goal of vanguardism: someone needs to steer the ship while the generational change happens. I don't know if that's the best path forward but it is a path and might work better with more safeguards against a Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot type but that's a hard conversation to have when people aren't willing to to consider any element of communism.

Can you fix the markdown of the second bullet point?

Have you ever been to China? (I have, family is from there and lives there, Hong Kong, and Saigon). Because their crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than ours. Even Hong Kong, had like 5 homicides late year… (China is trying to take over the island). They have cameras EVERY. WHERE. Therefore, you can’t get away with crimes. Sucks it has to be that way… but don’t do a crime and don’t have to worry, common sense.

America is horrid right now, tear gassing peaceful protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets which some victims have been lost eye site because they were hit in the face, no affordable healthcare options, MASSIVE FALSE information, govt approving bills that only help the rich, etc. The thing that is the worse is that if we cannot use tear gas in WAR why the FUCK are we using it as a weapon for our own people… the policing force and govt is now being the citizens enemy!

Yes, China is horrid for workers but like the previous comment “evil is still EVIL!” Is it that much better in America when we have people living paycheck to paycheck, homeless, can’t afford anything, etc. most of us still can’t afford damn healthcare… so China vs America… BOTH ARE FUCKING EVIL in their own ways! Our country is a laughing stock, people are flooding out and NO ONE is visiting or wants to come here anymore. We are the ONLY country with a DECLINE in tourists… not even China had a decline… that’s embarrassing!

Basically, evil is still evil not matter the degree!

Yes, I’ve been there multiple times. I have seen people who went to jail for sending a political meme on a private WeChat group because Xi felt insulted. Even in the US which is in a huge democratic backsliding for years, it’s nowhere that bad. In China there’s also “massive false information” but the thing is, it’s all government-run propaganda only and the rest of the world’s media is blocked. In the US, you can read Al Jazeera if you don’t like the American media narratives. In China you can’t. In USA, you can use Lemmy to laugh about Trump’s fake tan. In China Lemmy is blocked and even if it wasn’t, laughing at Xi gets you in jail. There’s no political freedom in China, even if it’s in shambles in the US now, let alone countries with a working democracy like Switzerland.

Hong Kong is not mainland China, you picked one of the only two places (alongside Macau) that doesn’t have a censored internet in China. Regular Chinese need to pay $30 for a visa/entry permit to Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a different system than Mainland China. When taking about China, I am talking about mainland China and not a special administrative region of Hong Kong, obviously.

Regarding the economy (I’ve never mentioned it and it has nothing to do with democracy but ok), many people in China also can’t afford health care and are living paycheck to paycheck (or worse). China is not just Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Do you think 120 yuan pension is enough in the Chinese village near Chengdu? That’s what grandparents of one of my Chinese friend make. Asked her if that’s enough, she laughed and replied “of course not!”. Do you think they were able to before retiring, working their whole lives as farmers? Do you really think such people don’t live paycheck to paycheck and it’s USA-exclusive issue than China doesn’t have? Do you know how many months of a median wage you need to work for a house in any major city in China vs in the US (spoiler: it’s even longer than in the US).

Summing up: the political freedom is still lower in China than in any flawed democracy (as I stated before), and China also has its economic issues which you seem to neglect. Yes, USA has those too, but it’s still among the richest countries in the world. You would be better off in many European countries if you’re poor but not in China.

Bro found out that poverty exists everywhere