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> what economics told me the free market was all about. Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.
by thesmtsolver2 3mo ago
> what economics told me the free market was all about.
Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoWhat is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright? I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
- chaostheory 3mo agoNo, he means that the US will close most of its domestic market to competition just like China has for decades, and the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
- echelon 3mo ago> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere The US is a net importer, not exporter. It needs to absorb trade at a deficit to encourage the use of the US dollar as the reserve currency. We import goods, we settle in surplus dollars. The world runs on those dollars. If the US starts dumping on various industries (how is it even primed to do this?), then the world reserve currency status comes into question.
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo agoMost of the Chinese domestic market is open to foreign competition. The areas that are closed off are those that are politically sensitive: publishing (including social media) and banking. As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.
- crote 3mo ago"Dumping" is when Chinese companies beat Western ones on the free market. If all claims of Chinese government subsidies on basic products were true, China would've gone bankrupt multiple times already. You're being beaten by a Chinese company? Why improve your own process when you can just lobby for sanctions and tariffs instead!
- noncoml 3mo agoThe US spent decades transferring manufacturing, capital, and know-how to China, while Chinese students trained, and excelled, at elite Western universities. Why are people surprised that China eventually became capable of competing with the US?
- testaburger 3mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/07/hostile-powers-spying-universities-canada-former-security-chief https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/07/hostile-powers... these students? Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service. David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics. “The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo agoPeople like Mr. Vigneault know nothing about how academia works. If they get their way, they'll do massive damage to Canada's academic research ecosystem. Academia is naturally open and international. These people don't get that academics publish their research in openly available journals. They go to conferences around the world and tell everyone who will listen exactly what they are working on. Unless you're working in a secretive government weapons lab, there's nothing to hide. In the US, people like Mr. Vigneault instituted a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese researchers, and ended up messing with the lives of all sorts of innocent people, including the director of MIT's mechanical engineering department. They found zero spies. Just a bunch of scientists working normally.
- crote 3mo ago> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.
- rednb 3mo agoExactly, it's funny how most Americans have no self-awareness on this topic. And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year. I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.
- chaostheory 3mo agoThe CCP's recent yearly subsidies for China's EV industry ranges from $30 billion - $46 billion per year compared to $10 billion - $20 billion per year for the US. A conservative estimate of total subsidies lands China at about $230 billion while the US was at $70 billion.
- rednb 3mo ago[flagged]
- deaux 3mo agoYes. Dumping abroad is the entire model that Silicon Valley has been built on in the last 2 decades. China just copied the model. And even then it's a light version of it.
- janalsncm 3mo agoJust a data point, but the US currently imposes a 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles.
- chaostheory 3mo agoWhat’s worse, tariffs or outright banning the competition from your market? China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty. Why is everyone suddenly surprised that globalism and free markets are coming to an end? Is this a net good? Mostly no unless you count more redundant supply chains.
- tw1984 3mo ago> China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty. such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading. globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty, it was designed to extract excessive values from those poor countries in the first place. painting globalism as something noble is naive at best. globalism was the theme of world trading for the past several decades, it was available to all nations. care to explain why other nations in poverty failed to be lifted by the exact same fancy globalism? let me help you on this one - China was THE leading technological and economical force of the vast majority part of human civilisation. What happened between 1840 and 2010 (the China in poverty period) was an outlier of the history. Globalism didn't lift China from that poverty, the ability to lead the human civilization which was embedded into the Chinese DNA did that. Kid, when our Chinese ancestors wrote the Art of War, your ancestors were still swinging on trees. You just missed that big picture.
- chaostheory 3mo ago> such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading. Yes, so the kettle is calling out the pot? > globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty It doesn’t matter what it was designed for. What matters is what it does in reality and there is no doubt that globalism helped lift China from Mao’s disastrous policies. That’s not mutually exclusive from China’s past as the Middle Kingdom
- 8note 3mo agoas in, the main trade complaint that trump has with nafta. the Uzs wants to dump subsidized dairy on canadian markets, and canada doesnt want it. same with US corn on Mexico and other central american countries, creating all those migrant problems in north america. wooo, americans subsidizing and dumping poor quality goods
- overfeed 3mo agoThe surviving non-American farmers would be confused by the future-speculative tense as America has already been doing this for decades in agriculture, and have been complaining for decades about both the subsidies and dumping of American corn.
- chaostheory 3mo agoSure, but not at China’s scale and no where close to number of industries where China does it. Why? The US was a net importer in order to support the dollar being the global reserve.
- deaux 3mo agoYou know, normally when I read these Reddit comments saying "you made me snort on the bus", I always took them as exaggeration. Turns out I was wrong, I just hadn't read something funny enough yet. > the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere This deserves to win HN comment of the year 2026. The majority of the NASDAQ market cap is a direct result of the US subsidizing and dumping its goods on the rest of the world en masse.
- watwut 3mo agoWhole Silicon Valley is based on selling products under price, for years, killing the competition or making it impossible and extracting once monopoly position is stable enough. It is the same play book again and again and again and again. It runs unprofitable companies for absurd lengths of time.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoOr building backdoor in to the physical servers sold around the world?
- _aavaa_ 3mo agoHow do you think the major AI companies trained there model? Pirated books and anything that could be torrented and scraped of the web.
- potsandpans 3mo agoA credit system that determine your upward mobility?
- thisisit 3mo agoAmerica industries used to play by the same rules. Look up Samuel Slater.