No you’re thinking of Woody from Toy Story. He died in an Apartheid South African prison in 1978.

Yeah the hate is weird. I’m not the biggest stream watcher, but I can respect the medium. Streamers are just doing the modern version of what AM talk radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh did. Not in terms of content or politics, but in terms of format. Limbaugh ran multi-hour long shows reacting to news and headlines. His listeners primarily listened passively, letting the radio run in the background of daily life. He would take calls and engage with his audience directly. Streaming is just modern talk radio.

Millennials had our share of people that were famous just for being famous. Paris Hilton anyone? We’ve always had influencers, people famous for no particular accomplishments or creative works. I actually prefer the modern version. The past versions were mostly folks from very wealthy backgrounds who came into the limelight due to family connections. If you’re already around a bunch of celebrities and media types because your family is incredibly wealthy, it’s easy for someone to translate that access into fame of their own.

In contrast, at least modern influencers have a decent shot at being from humble backgrounds. They’re still vapid and famous just for being famous, but at least they had to hustle to earn any amount of fame in the first place.

Sure. My point is that every generation that’s existed since mass consumer culture began will have their versions of this. Contrast Precious Moments figurines among Boomers to Funko Pops for Millennials.

Behold the inevitable future of funko pops.

Thanks!

I’m not familiar. What misdeeds have the Ubuntu folks been up to?

We use the barter economy here. You have to personally go to Jaybone’s house and perform mutual aid sexual favors for them.

You’re dancing around my core question.

I’m talking about the past, not the future. I’m specifically asking about the past. I don’t want to hear about all the great things China promises to do. I want to know why they chose to create billionaires. I want to know why China is the way it is now. I don’t want to hear glittering promises about what it will become.

I ask you again. Why the billionaires? Why did a nominally socialist country not design its market economy (which it built from scratch) to be more equitable from the start?

I’m not talking about what China may change into. I’m asking why they didn’t plan this from the start. The CCP has in its ranks literally millions of people formally educated in the theories of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and others. They know class struggle and the inevitable outcomes of unregulated capitalism. It’s not like they couldn’t easily predict that a market economy would lead to billionaires. If anyone could be expected to design their market economy in an equitable way, it’s the CCP. And there wasn’t a class of wealthy businessmen that took over the government and forced them to adopt these economic policies. They created their market economy from scratch; they could have built it on a worker co-op model. They CHOSE the current model.

China’s existing market economy did not evolve spontaneously. The old pre-Communist market economy was destroyed in the Revolution and during the Mao era. China’s billionaires aren’t just the wealthy inheritors of Qing-era nobles. They’re all new money; they made their fortunes in the economy Deng and others created. The post-Mao leaders of China created a market economy from scratch, and they could have made it any way they wanted. They chose a model that allows for billionaires.

I want to know why they made that choice. Why didn’t Deng and others build the new Chinese market economy with hard wealth caps or around worker-owned co-ops?

I’m not really asking about capital circulation. I’m interested specifically in the billionaires. So why the billionaires?

I can understand the logic of having a market-based economy. It’s a very effective means of achieving compound economic growth. But a market economy does not require billionaires. There are numerous more equitable models that China could have built its system around. For example, they could have built their market economy based entirely around worker-owned co-ops. Co-ops can compete just fine in markets. Or, they could have gone with the current structure, but put in place a wealth cap. That’s been proposed before even in the US.

Why couldn’t China build a market economy, but just have a hard rule of “no one is allowed to amass more than X amount?” Even if people couldn’t hoard more than say, $100 million, that still gives people plenty of incentive to start new businesses, get an education, work hard, etc.

You linked a source repeating your earlier claim about the raw number of people lifted out of poverty. Again, I ask, what about per-capita income?

This is a ridiculous comparison. Taiwan received substantial foreign aid from the US because of it’s strategic value against the mainland, while the PRC was subject to a massive economic embargo.

China received extensive aid from the USSR.

That… what? I don’t follow what you’re saying here at all.

Do you understand what “per capita” means? It would be far more impressive for a country of one million people to lift 950,000 people out of poverty than for a nation of 1 billion people to lift 800 million people out of poverty.

It’s much easier for a small country to modernize in a short period of time, especially with outside help. It’s very difficult to reach all the people in all the rural areas of China, it means more infrastructure has to be built, more people have to be educated, etc.

Why? I see no reason for this. Larger countries have more resources. Everything you need to lift people out of poverty scales with population. If anything, it’s actually EASIER for large countries to lift themselves out of poverty. A tiny micro-nation with a population of 10,000 isn’t going to be building an aircraft factory. There’s a lot of minimum-size requirements on certain national infrastructure. If anything, the bigger, the easier it is to modernize. Yes, the larger population creates greater needs, but you also have more people to address those needs.

And China was not unique in having disconnected rural populations. Small countries and big countries both have isolated rural areas.

I don’t agree that per-capita is the relevent statistic for the above reasons.

It’s the only meaningful way to compare countries. Otherwise you just end up making brain-dead conclusions like, “the big country has the big number. Therefore it’s better.”

Why the billionaires though? Sure, you can argue that China needed to adopt a largely market-based economy in order to grow its economic base. But a market economy does not require billionaires. Why couldn’t China do exactly what it’s doing now with worker-owned cooperatives? Why does there have to be one rich guy at the top hoarding all the money?

What’s stopping China right now from instituting a maximum wealth cap?

Tankie (n): a Fox News Republican with a progressive streak. Core defining features are a love for historical despots and the belief that any source that disagrees with them is “Fake News.”

Words have different meanings in different contexts. Yes, China isn’t the perfect theoretical communist utopia predicted by Marx. But in the English language, people call the type of government system used by Stalin and Mao “Communist.” A word was needed for their systems, as it was clearly different from capitalist countries. And Stalin and Mao themselves called their systems Communist. And their systems aspired to the vision of Marx. They both considered themselves to be Communist and fully identified with the term. So we call that system Communist. Whether it actually lives up to the theoretical model of Communism is irrelevant. When people use the word “Communist,” they are referring to the type of government created by Stalin, Mao, etc. This is theoretical vs applied communism. You want to only apply to the word to theoretical communism. But the English language uses it to apply to both theoretical and applied communism.

Capitalism looks very little like the theoretical models crafted by people like Adam Smith, yet we still call Western governments capitalist. Often the theoretical proves impossible to implement, so the label gets applied to the practical implementation, not the theoretical ideal.

When you say, “but China isn’t Communist!” you’re not actually accomplishing anything. You’re just arguing that a definition that has been commonly and widely used for over a century at this point is invalid. People have been using “Communism” to refer to both applied and theoretical Communism since at least the 1920s. I know you want to only use the word to apply to theoretical Communism, but the whole world moved on from your viewpoint a long time ago.

better salaries compared to its neighbours, better medicine etc.

[CITATION NEEDED.]

Also, any source that disagrees with you, biased sources like Wikipedia, are just Fake News!

Unfortunately the “no standing army” thing was a product of a certain age. When the fastest an army could move is via sail or a trotting horse, you can get away with not having a standing army. In the months it took your enemy to reach you, you could train and prepare. Standing armies always had some advantage, but it was actually possible to maintain a viable defense without one.

But today? The enemy army will be occupying your capital before you can even send all the draft notices out. Imagine if Ukraine had had no standing army when Russia invaded. And that’s just with how quick ground armies can move. We haven’t even mentioned aircraft and paratroopers!

Sure, there are a handful of countries with no standing army today, but they’re countries that simply don’t need a credible defense. Iceland has no army. But an Iceland without an army would perform in war only slightly worse than an Iceland that was as devoted to war as the historical Spartans. Iceland could tax themselves into oblivion and put every citizen they could in uniform, but they just don’t have the population to credibly deter an invasion by a major power. The only countries without standing armies today are very small countries that, due to their population, are completely dependent on outside allies for their defense.

And yet, China has delivered substantially lower average incomes than its peers. It’s not even close. The people of Taiwan, despite sharing a common cultural and ethnic history as mainland China, enjoy a substantially higher standard of living than their mainland peers.

Yes, they’ve raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, but that’s been the case throughout East Asia. The whole region saw its standard of living dramatically rise as it industrialized. And the capitalist countries have enjoyed far greater economic success than the communist ones.

The absolute number of people is a red herring. Obviously big countries have more people.

I’m hoping you’re not one of those .ml folks that acts like a Republican and calls every source they don’t like “Fake News.” But in case you are, can you provide your own sources? I would be curious on your thoughts of the per-capita incomes of China vs the capitalist East Asian countries. Can you show that China has performed better than them on a per-capita basis?

“The ends justify the means.”

Surely that’s never caused any problems…

Don’t forget the post doc!