> You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions.
Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires. Between 2003 and the mid 2010s it EXECUTED at least 15 billionaires.
When was the last time a US billionaire faced a death penalty case, even when their actions directly result in tens of thousands of innocents dying?
Isn’t the US much more aligned with the dreams of the capital class, given that distinction alone? All the money in the world won’t save a Chinese citizen from their laws. Meanwhile, we have the President’s family selling crypto coins and NFTs and Trump Gold Cards and “produced by USA” Trump phones made in China.
You're putting capital on a higher hill than the political class. That's not always the case.
Billionaires are problematic by their very existence, but the sort of power they want is what the CCP has. They want to use their capital to build that. Trump's having the best luck so far. If there are people who also just happen to be extremely wealthy who get in their way, they'd gladly use the power they then had to get rid of them. Alex Karp would be a good example of this sort of aspirational melding of the state and capital.
In a way, the CCP is beyond someone with a lot of money being able to do anything about it, which would be nice, except for the fact that they're totalitarian.
Given the Trump administration’s actions against private industry from TikTok, to Anthropic, to a hundred other examples from auto makers to air conditioning manufacturers, is it fair to deem it delusional to think he might possibly succeed?
Good luck suing the White House, sovereign immunity basically makes this impossible in most cases.
While sovereign immunity is a problem in and of itself that must be reformed, the real problem here is the illegitimate supplicants on the Supreme Council.
Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?
The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.
BYD's direction was largely at the behest of the Chinese government, who were willing to demand things of BYD in exchange for that protectionism, instead of wringing their hands and saying "nothing you can do about the market" while simultaneously propping up industries of national strategic significance.
"Lawful" as determined by the party executing the action is very different from actually lawful.
The courts can intervene later, but they can't un-bomb a hospital.
This is setting aside the obvious problem where governments will often set laws based on self-interest rather than morality, particularly when it comes to military conflict.
This government doesn't GAF what is "lawful" and what isn't. Was what happened to Pretti and Good in Minneapolis lawful? Would you work for ICE/CBP with no qualms at all?
See also the new national sport of hunting for fishing boats off the South American coast. Is that "lawful?"
And yes, since you went there: everything the Nazis did was "lawful." To the extent it wasn't "lawful," they made it "lawful."
> Don't attack law enforcement with a deadly weapon, whether it's a vehicle or gun.
How do you attack law enforcement with a gun while on your knees, with your arms pinned behind you and the gun is holstered? It's interesting how we can watch the same video, and some people only see what they are told to see.
Atlas Shrugged, more charitably perhaps despite its manifest flaws, seemed to me to be about the dangers of putting “the needs of the many” over individual rights, and how it can ultimately be self defeating for the whole.
I don’t think, “too much equality” was one of the themes. Rather, it was about too much centralized power over the individual. And yes I do think that’s somewhat relevant to understanding issues of today, including mass surveillance the centralization of technological control behind crypto-nationalized zaibatsus, etc.
Wasn’t 1984 a bit more about control through surveillance and silencing, than about pain? Everything was a lie, and every refusal to accept the lie was a signal to Big Brother.
Cast as such it seems rather more prophetic than Soma, IMO.
Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.
Here’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.
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