Hacker News Reader

Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously the protectionist crowd would take issue with all this,

"We" (the US) still lives in a violent world, or at the very least a slow, soft violent world where soft power might cut us off from Taiwan.

I find the fact that one half of the "techno-elite" crowd thinks that giving up on hard problems is a long term feasible position. We must be able to manufacture and produce the absolute best fundamental technologies from a strategic standpoint, even if it isn't a core, market efficient concern.

The rest of the world is modernizing, dealing with modern problems (disease spread, high end technical manufacturing, green technology), and we can't even get out of our own way. Frustrating.

View on HN

Agreed. We are the country that designed, created, and operated the SR-71 Blackbird, put a man on the moon, and built the Hoover Dam, among other incredible feats of organization, engineering, and manufacturing.

I fear as a country we are not capable of that type of thing any more and I am not only frustrated, I'm saddened.

BTW if anyone has any examples of more recent (post-2016) successes of a similar magnitude and impressiveness, I could definitely use a mood boost.

I would say Elon Musk via his development of Tesla (first modern viable electric car) and of SpaceX (first almost fully reusable low cost space solution). They are different "type" than the ones you quote, but the sheer magnitude and long term impact of both those companies will likely reverberate for decades to come.

Elon Musk, the South African that builds a lot of his cars in China?

It's hard to assign an achievement to a specific country unless it's a government project.

By that metric Saturn was built by the German that bombed London.

I'm not a Tesla fanboy, but Tesla is an American company.

Agreed, there are strategic complexities, more so now than ever before. I'm not attempting to make a pure argument for free trade vs protectionist - I'm merely making an argument why we should strive towards free trade policies rather than protectionist policies in the long run.

Also historically speaking, America (compared to some other governments and policy bodies in the world) doesn't generally over regulate or adopt policies on young industries. This is generally in the spirit of not quashing broad innovation too early.

To your point though, we are indeed struggling with modern problems. Many of our modern problems though are partially due to modern marvels. I for one am optimistic we will make progress in some of these areas.

Hence one of the major reasons why the DoD pressured TSMC to open a 5nm fab in Arizona.

Optimizing for quarterly profits is the American Way.

If by the 'American Way' you're referring to capitalism, is there another substantially different system that has produced as much innovation, wealth, and prosperity over such a short period in human history?

Don't get me wrong, I understand the cynicism here. There is no perfect system, but I just don't know of one that has empirically produced better results. Certainly not socialism or communism.

I am sick of 'communism is worse', it's a platitude that demonstrates poor understanding of economics.

Capitalism is not a singular thing, economic policy of the 30s, 60s and 2020s is very different. There are various schools of though: Shumpeterian, kensyan, neoliberal, austeian, etc. Lately neoliberal system has been dominant, and delivered remarcably poor results for most of us.

I'll be the first to admit that capitalist systems have had their failures, but communist systems have never had a success. Communism was tried in more than a dozen countries across a century, in different cultures, in different geographic regions, in societies with very different levels of technological development. Not once did it create a success like Japan or Singapore or the USA or Hong Kong. Heck, we even split two countries down the middle and ran one side communist and one side capitalist (Germany & Korea). In both cases, the communist side became a hellhole and the capitalist side wasn't a bad place to live.

oh my god, the entire point of my post is that bringing up communism is a red herring that totally derails the conversation and has no relevance.

We should be discussing the economic system we currently have and various ways it is / was / can be structured. Even the justice system, the cornerstone of civilised society, has been corrupted.

For example why is it that we have publicly funded police but not publicly funded lawyers that can actually hold firms to account for contract violations? Why do companies that pay no taxes enjoy priority when it comes to public prosecution over regular Joe. Why is it, that if I owe the state a few grand, I will be hauled before a court within a day, but if BigCorpX owes the state a few billion they get to negotiate a special tax deal with massive 'discounts'? The list is truly endless.

> as much innovation

War. Wartime has always been a fantastic generator of innovation. It unfortunately destroys mass amounts of capital and kills and wounds many people in the process.

> wealth, and prosperity

Charity and taxpayer-funded government investment. The Marhshall Plan dramatically improved the prosperity and efficiency of much of Europe and was paid for by US taxes. The Green Revolution was funded by the US, UN, and Rockefeller Foundation.

Capitalism is a valuable tool, but too many accolades are laid at its feet these days.

Capitalism is the only tool for insuring plutocratic fascism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com