(11-28-2024, 01:10 PM)homebiscuit Wrote:

(11-28-2024, 12:26 PM)mikesez Wrote: If China is able to maintain incentives for ordinary Chinese people to work hard and innovate, the CCP itself will diversify, become less repressive, and you will see Chinese businesses compete with each other. These things are definitely happening in the electric car sector. If these things happen in more sectors, the Chinese success will be deserved.  

In the more likely scenario, China will continue to mow down entrepreneurs who get too big and they will be unable to do anything but make stuff others invented cheaper and faster.  That is no way to improve their citizens' quality of life and does not help on the "soft power" front either.  

Tariffs are an appropriate punishment for China's use of slave labor, overuse of coal, lack of worker protections, lack of environmental protections, IP theft, and many other wrongs.  But they should be targeted to the things we can make lots of elsewhere.  Target their steel and electronics and motors and textiles.  Don't target the solar panels and batteries.  The world needs as many solar panels and batteries as possible right now.

Communism, by its very nature, cannot become less repressive. There's a reason they build walls, physical and technological, around their fiefdoms. When the people discover and enjoy freedom, communism dies. The CCP has played it out to about as far as they can now while still maintaining control.

Communism and Socialism have never been successful in real life. Only in extremely controlled environments like Universities.  I do not blame many Democrats for some of their ideas. People Like Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Shumer, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and many more have never operated in the public sector or had to make a living working. They just do not have the life experience. They depend on highly educated people who also have never had to work for a living.  I cannot count the number of the latter type that once in the real world making a living came to the conclusion many of the ideas they had or were taught in school just are not applicable to the real world. Those that didn't were quickly relegated to lower level positions as they had zero common sense.

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