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ex_banana-eater

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    ex_banana-eater got a reaction from softwareNerd in It is now illegal to give things away for free in France   
    Wow, they're late to the scene. The US made giving away free web browsers illegal a long time ago when they prosecuted Microsoft.
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    ex_banana-eater got a reaction from JASKN in What do you think of Peter Schiff's thesis?   
    True, but why does that matter to us? If China goes from producing 5 trillion to producing 15 trillion dollars worth of goods, and the US slowly sinks a trillion over a decade, we ought to be investing in companies in China and getting out of US investments.

    I hope, for the sake of the US and the world, that they do something about their deficits. Are you optimistic about the US producing balanced budgets and reducing the debt before Asia stops buying their T-bills? I am skeptical that even balanced federal budgets will be accomplished within the next two years. Maybe after the election of a new president. But the US still has to worry about bailing out socialist states and cities like those in California in the near-term.
    I live in Korea but I'm in contact with a lot of Chinese people too. If we view Korea as a more developed model of China's future then I'd have to disagree with your statement about environmental laws and labour laws. Korea is developed and they certainly don't believe in making environmental regulations so tight that oil refineries would not be opened in 30 years, like the US has done. In fact, Korea has some of the biggest oil refineries in the world. There is no environmentalist ideology here like there is in the US. There are leftists but there is an absence of the New Left. Being in Seoul is like a breath of fresh air, you know there are no beggars and drug addicts all over the streets like there are in the US in Canada? And that's in a city of 20 million. This is a developed country and there is almost no welfare and pension system. My Korean girlfriend's father works 6 days a week and comes in to the office Sunday mornings--and that's normal here, even for elementary school students.

    My experience with Chinese people and knowledge of China leads me to opinions about that country similar to Korea. When people apply for a job in China they ask how many days they can work not how many holidays they will get. There are 500,000 engineers graduating every year in China and these people don't go on ski trips on the weekends, they want to work. Even if they up the regulations a bit, who are they going to lose out to? Maybe Bangladesh and India in select cases, but you can't build a steel mill in those places as fast as you can in China and those countries have pitiful infrastructure. You can open a major factory in 6 months in China--think about the time it would take in the US.

    Why should the Chinese emulate Europe and the US when they have Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan to look to full of Chinese people? Arguably, those are the examples that originally sparked a change in the minds of some Chinese political leaders.

    China's regulation is location based. That is, you can move from one place to another and they will have different laws about production. China's economic success comes from the fact that they established free trade zones, financial zones and special economic zones throughout the country and then millions of people moved to these places. People moved to freedom in their own country, yet large amounts of people are still poor farmers in areas that are virtually the same as 30 years ago politically speaking. This structure, in my opinion, does not lead to overarching environmental or labour laws which will apply to everyone. They have had those labour and property laws in place for a long time--they are still in existence outside the cities that were allowed to develop.

    This political structure means that hundreds of millions of people are still economically unfree, while those who have migrated to places such as Shenzhen (20 million in a couple decades) are able to enjoy economic freedom. Hundreds of millions of people are currently restricted by a system of registration called the Hukou system which does not allow them to leave the countryside. There is major political pressure in China to abandon this system. Newspapers recently broke with the government and published articles en masse promoting the disbanding of this system. If it is abolished it means adding hundreds of millions of people to the economic machine of China. It would be like the collapse of communism to another 300-600 million people. Whatever regulations are likely in some industries in China as they become more affluent will never touch the economic growth potential of freeing 300-600 million new people. I think this system will be reformed and therefore I have high hopes for continued economic growth in China.
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