So when I was a kid I noticed that countries that name "People's" or "Democratic" in their full names tended to be brutal dictatorships (eg GDR (East Germany),

So when I was a kid I noticed that countries that name "People's" or "Democratic" in their full names tended to be brutal dictatorships (eg GDR (East Germany), PRC (China)). Those that had both were brutal dictatorships on steroids (ie DPRK aka North Korea). I found this interesting because it was an early lesson in how people will coopt words to hide the true nature of things, something that happens all the time. For example, if the US government enacts a new piece of legislation and it has the name "patriot" or "freedom" in it, you can bet your last dollar it's going to take away your rights. Another version of this is the now conflated term of "free trade". Free trade in its purest form is freedom of goods and services to cross borders without quotas, tariffs or other artificial barriers to entry. We largely have that now yet countries like the US want to impose a legislative agenda on the rest of the world through large multilateral treaties like the TPP and TIPP all under the guise of "free trade". Now either economists and politicians have forgotten what free trade actually means or they're wailfully ignoring it for their own idealogical agendas. I find this [1] a good account of the conflation of "free trade" and the "free movement of capital". Back in high school economics I learned about the foreign debt trap where instead of trade outflows from your trading partner, the money came back as capital to buy assets and the means of production. Have such basic principles really fallen out of favour in the blind devotion to the free movement of capital? So the developed world clamored for China to join the WTO, probably sensing a giant opportunity to sell goods to a new market of a billion Chinese. Thing is, despite claims to play fair, China has basically cheated at every step along the way. For example: - Not opening their markets to foreign companies; - Blatant IP infringement; - Theft of military and scientific knowledge; - Pegging their currency to the US dollar rather than letting it float so they could accumulate giant hard currency reserves; and (more recently) - Restricting capital outflows. I'm really surprised (even concerned) that the West (in particular) doesn't demand the same access to China that China gets to the rest of the world. And we could go further into China's many other transgressions: no freedom of the press, the annexation of Tibet, Tiannemen Square, human rights violations, labour camps, material support to North Korea and so on. [1] http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/ http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/