I'm no more or less comfortable with authoritarian government than I am with an authoritarian market-based corporatocracy.
Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech. Odds are that if you refused to sign one, you couldn't afford a mortgage in a place with a lot of tech. Odds are you will sign more NDAs so your kids can keep going to the same school. The freedom of no regulation is an illusion.
Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you. Without regulation, video games will become more and more addicting. Without regulation, companies will keep running advertising, even if ads harm culture and the overall economy.
To manage all of this, we need a better system. I, for one, am excited about countries trying something different. The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life, from limiting stress on kids, to workforce stress, to limiting unhealthy activities. I'd like to see how that plays out.
As a footnote, I'd even be excited about a fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, if it wasn't expansionary, and if people were free to emigrate if it was't working for them.
I'm not sure a country that commits cultural genocide and sent a million or more Muslim Uighurs into reeducation camps is where you should be looking for a "better system". Forced sterilization, forced labor...
Or a country that has no freedom of the press, savagely beats or murders political dissidents, will take away your job and livelihood if you dare question CCP orthodoxy...
The fact that you think is somehow morally equivalent to an NDA is just absolutely astonishing.
Well, the US did kinda oops away a million Muslims in response to 9/11, and over a half-million Americans in lack of response to COVID19. And we do have that whole gitmo thing. Plus, we had the whole slavery bit we keep forgetting about. I could list this stuff for a while, but that's besides the point.
It's not the current state that matters, but possible future outcome.
We're both hill-climbing trying to improve systems from an imperfect present. The US is higher up its hill than China right now, but it's not clear that China won't pass the US in a few decades. Or the US will race ahead. Or how other systems will fare.
It's also not clear how those will change as the world itself evolves.
I like having a diversity of political and economic systems, even is some are better than others. I also like a diversity of cultures, even if there are ones I strongly disagree with.
No, I'm not defending the CCP's actions, and my best argument for the CCP is that I'd like a diversity of economic, political, and cultural systems around the world. I don't like monocultures. They're brittle.
>Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech.
These are mostly very specific, very limited and largely perfectly sensible. Yes some NDAs are onerous but they're quite rare. China has no concept of freedom of speech at all. It simply doesn't exist. I don't see how that's better.
>Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you.
We actually do have market regulation in the west, more in some countries than others, but it's a well established principle. You may disagree with the regulations we have, that's a matter of opinion, but we do have regulations on safety, quality, etc. If you want further regulations you are free to campaign for them, but the lack of any relations you might want is not a flaw in the system, it's just a consensus choice you disagree with.
>The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life...
All western states, even the US, have regulated labour markets including controls on working hours, minimum wages, mandatory breaks, etc. 996 is in practice illegal in almost every (possibly actually every) western country already. We are way, way ahead of China on this, so much so that you thinking China is breaking ground is frankly laughable.
Many countries already have guidelines in place on activities like video games. Public health systems recognise, provide advice and support, and even treatment for games addiction. The CCP is not breaking any novel ground on any of this. The fact is it has a woefully inadequate public health system and primitive social services that are so bad they have to resort to crude dictatorial mandates like this because it's all they have left. That is not a good thing.
There's a famous quote attributed to Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” The only way we'll find better ones is if we keep exploring.
It's not so much that I want more or fewer regulations, as I want to explore systems other than market-based incentives. I'm not sure that regulations + free markets will get us to a place where people aren't addicted to video games, eat healthy, exercise, have quality education, and generally lead the good life. In 1930, there were a lot of ideas for how to get there, and a lot of those seem plausible. I'd like to see how some of those play out in practice.
I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US. Everyone has access to decent, affordable healthcare. It's not at the same level as $50,000 procedures in the US, but it's good enough, and everyone has it.
It's also not really fair to compare countries with $64k per-capita GDP to ones with $10k per-capita GDP. It's even more unfair if one considers where the per-capita GDP was a decade or two ago. 25 years ago, China had a per-capita GDP of under $1000 -- that's less than Nigeria today. I think that's a more fair comparison between systems of government. Would you rather live in Nigerian democracy or Chinese CCP? That's not a loaded question -- they're quite different.
> Oh good grief.
Islam has a lot of good ideas too. For example, it has a wealth tax, and it discourages debt-based economies. You don't need to swallow political and economic systems wholesale.
>I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US.
This is not true at all, I know because my wife is Chinese. Almost everyone is covered by health insurance in theory, but in practice this has limited use by most people because it only covers 50% of costs, and less than that for serious illnesses. Those on low incomes simply can't afford it anyway and there is nothing comparable to the level of cover under Medicaid or CHIPS, or Medicare for the elderly. Everyone under the public system has to pay up or not get treatment. Employer plans are better, but still very basic compared to typical US corporate plans. Waiting lists can also often put treatment out of practical reach unless you are willing to pay a lot of money to the right people.
It's also very scammy. They charge for everything they do, from painkillers, saline drips, blood tests, being hooked up to a blood oxymeter. On arrival they will set up all of that, the works, whether it's necessary or not so they can charge you for it. There is little to no regulation to prevent such abuses, and no practical way to get redress for malpractice.
On experimentation, communism and authoritarianism have been tried many, many times. There's nothing novel or experimental about it. We know it sucks. We know what Taliban style Islamic theocracies are like too, Afghanistan has been under one before remember?
> On experimentation, communism and authoritarianism have been tried many, many times. There's nothing novel or experimental about it. We know it sucks. We know what Taliban style Islamic theocracies are like too, Afghanistan has been under one before remember?
And Democracy was tried several times during the French Revolution, as well as in many countries in Africa, to great failure. You can't generalize from small n.
It's really unclear how Communism would have worked out if not for Stalin. Communism isn't fundamentally authoritarian. The concept of workers soviets as a political system sounds pretty plausible to me. Things played out that way, but it's only been tried once.
And as far as a planned economy, I think the feasibility really changes with access to computers which can simulate complex systems. Market economies are a greedy algorithm. It's likely there's a better system.
What I like in the current Chinese model is market economy for commodity businesses (like restaurants) and central control of rent-seeking ones (like banking). That seems more efficient. I also like the concept of systems of governance which are more meritocratic (which contrasts with populist ideals in the US), where competent people make decisions, and where you can plan strategically over long periods. I don't think China has yet stumbled on the right model there. But they're trying.
Sorry, but Marxism has coercion at it's core because it's maximally redistributive. I'm no libertarian fundamentalist, I'm proud if my contribution to society through my taxes, but Marxism takes confiscation to the ultimate extreme. All property belongs to the state, all needs are decided and provided by the state. Max called it 'society' and said that society would regulate every aspect of the economy, but in practice it's the state.
As for tried out once, er, this whole thread is about China not the USSR. Stalin died 39 years before the collapse of the USSR, they had four decades to fix it. There's also Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia. Robert Mugabe was a Maoist, Hugo Chavez was a Marxist. It's been tried over and over. They've all either run their country into the ground or basically given up on Marxism and clung on to power anyway.
You're quite right that democracy has had plenty of failures, that's irrefutable. It certainly does create a moral dilemma, but I still believe in allowing as much individual choice and autonomy as is practically achievable.
Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech. Odds are that if you refused to sign one, you couldn't afford a mortgage in a place with a lot of tech. Odds are you will sign more NDAs so your kids can keep going to the same school. The freedom of no regulation is an illusion.
Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you. Without regulation, video games will become more and more addicting. Without regulation, companies will keep running advertising, even if ads harm culture and the overall economy.
To manage all of this, we need a better system. I, for one, am excited about countries trying something different. The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life, from limiting stress on kids, to workforce stress, to limiting unhealthy activities. I'd like to see how that plays out.
As a footnote, I'd even be excited about a fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, if it wasn't expansionary, and if people were free to emigrate if it was't working for them.