https://www.ft.com/content/a39b9dbf-decc-4e63-9929-628c75519058
The opacity of its system enables the country to routinely shock the rest of the world
PRC: publicly announces new Five Year Plan
Western newspapers: What Is China Planning? Experts Are Baffled
…five years later…
PRC: completes Five Year Plan
Western newspapers: The opacity of its system enables the country to routinely shock the rest of the world
The concept of planning for the future makes no sense to a capitalist. Why plan for the future when you could profit right now?
I’m sure you’re being reductive here for comedic effect/mockery of the absolute microminds who often end up with massive capital to “invest,” but I find it more… fun?… to examine why it is that these people are how they are.
On the topic of profits, what you’re saying is clearly and obviously true. Much like industries always trend towards monopoly over a long enough timeline in a “free market” there’s going to be a similar trend towards short term profit making as the only option. I know this is probably super obvious to anyone who really thinks about the economy and businesses and such basically at all. It’s important though to just be aware that this is one of the most inherent flaws to any capitalistic economic setup. It’s a system that will ALWAYS result in shoddy commodity production because no corporation (or individual “small proprietor” definitely cannot stand against the corporations) can afford the “losses” which will surely be taken in the quest for superior products and/or services.
Again, obvious to anyone who bothers to think at all, but this is seriously one of the funniest contradictions or hypocrisies at the very heart of dipshittery like libertarians. They believe, in a nutshell, minimum government will result in the best products and overall a society that can prosper and prosper faster. Something to that effect anyway. I’m not even going to go into what their ACTUAL ideology is, the nominal one is fine here. Libertarians, much like the neolibs, conservatives, whatever other flavor of shitlib, suffer from the lack of historical knowledge that basically every person in the first world seems to have. This vision of “we have advanced tech. And that was gained by allowing a free market to do things!” They of course ignore that basically every useful innovation of the last 100-150 years produced by first world western nations was done so in the pursuit of military technology funded by the fucking government. Basically none of it was privately done.
I’m kind of bored of breaking this down at this point, but I do find it funny how they all jack off to this free market ideal which has never existed (and can never) and ignore that every thing worth having was produced using government funding. If we could do more of that and remove the stupid fucking military tech angle who knows what we could accomplish. Only governments can afford the massive manpower and money sinks that produce world-changing tech. There is no fucking board of directors or CEO on earth who could afford or allow the time to cook to produce things like the internet. It’s just a giant sink hole of money and it would probably never pay off for the investors anyway since it would necessarily need to be public domain so others could take it and innovate further.
I guess my point here overall is the economic system, capitalism, produces these people who then reproduce the system. So it’s fine to shit on them, but like Marx always made the point of portraying, these capitalists are individuals who simply personify capital. I think of capital as power and if you place that power in a state’s government it can be harnessed and controlled and used for some general, genuine advancement of humanity in a good way. If you place the capital, that power, in one person or small group, it will be uncontrollable, wild, and will result in nothing productive being done. See: every fucking billionaire most notable Zuck and Elon who literally cannot stop fucking up everything they touch. It’s kind of not their fault though. I mean, it is, yes, but it’s society’s fault for ever allowing that capital, that power, to be wielded by individuals like it has been. (I refuse to make a LotR type reference. Fellow nerds can mentally insert their own.)
Oh absolutely. I was just doing the funny sound bite.
It's not that capitalists can't think about future planning, but rather, the system does not allow them to. If their competitor were to make more profit than them in the short term, they could run them out of business and no amount of long term planning would matter then. It's a society-wide prisoner's dilemma, where every capitalist is forced to be amoral, forced to focus solely on profit, because they are out competed if they choose not to do those things.
The libertarian types are hilarious though. Their obsession with the "profit motive" ignores the fact that...most things aren't invented for profit, they are just patented and monopolized for profit. (Though these are the same people who seem to think that government regulation of business causes monopolies somehow, so I have no idea what their train of thought really is.)
""its emergence as the world’s biggest auto exporter and leader in electric vehicles have all surprised large segments of the international community."""--from the article.
It's the 'international community' again... 🤡
They wouldn't be surprised if they bothered to read anything outside of Chinese collapse fanfiction by Gordon Chang.
The ''inscrutable oriental'' strikes again.
Under a google search of ''inscrutable oriental'', despite linking to the trope and explaining it to some degree, we get more examples.
Thanks for proving our point.