Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Hubris is the right word. There are two things here I think are worth noting:

1) The US just challenged the world's leading manufacturing power to manufacture new things. That plan is not going to work. They're up against a culture that builds, builds smart and builds quickly.

2) There is actual racism in the US that is tipping the research scales towards China [0]. Between that and the concerning trends in political destabilisation the states are relying on China making a lot of mistakes as a nation if they intend to keep ahead. The whole US model was importing the bright sparks from other cultures and supporting them with freedom and strong property rights.

[0] https://news.stanford.edu/2021/11/18/stanford-community-memb... - just one in a disturbing number of articles I've been seeing.

View on HN

What does racism have to do with something that is so obviously an economic based power struggle? Preventing Chinese researchers is not racist. There seems to be no problems allowing any other Asians in. It's a uniquely China issue, and for good reason given the extent of the IP theft and threats against US interests.

I assume you mean intellectual property rights, not physical property rights?

No, I mean physical. China's lack of IP protections is one of the reasons they have managed to overtake the US in a few areas. Empowering people to block progress has never been a great plan for driving progress. Silicon Valley only holds together as an innovation engine because Stallman figured out how to hack copyright in a way that promotes a free-for-all.

China is not a safe place to own things. Compare Elon Musk to Jack Ma. Both annoy the powers that be. One gets the call-him-a-nazi treatment from time to time and the other disappeared for a bit then fled to Japan.

If Ma had built up his asset base in the US, he'd have been a lot better off.

I think I agree that the US is a decent place for the ownership of immaterial assets (so long as you can avoid civil forfeiture), but I'd argue it's a lousy place for property (of the real estate variety) rights.

Why do you see it this way? To me the US looks like one of the countries with the longest and best property rights travk-record in the world. I think this is a major factor underpinning the US economy

The US does very little to protect property rights. A lot of places have extremely aggressive zoning (a police power, established by the Euclid v. Ambler SCOTUS case) that limits even what kind of housing you can build or how big a parcel must be.

We also play fast and loose with eminent domain, allowing government to take away property and hand it to another private developer to produce pretty much anything; the development doesn't even have to be something like public infrastructure. (Kelo v. City of New London SCOTUS case)

Municipalities are free to extort a variety of silly easements out of folks seeking permits. In my own town, the planning commission routinely extracts enormous conservation easements or public pathway easements (often larger than an acre in the SF Bay Area, where that much land is handily worth north of $1M) from anyone trying to build or remodel a house. In what universe is that not a taking, as defined by the Constitution? This universe, of course.

So yes, our property rights protections are incredibly weak. You have more freedom to do what you will with your property in formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe than you do in the United States.

Are you sure? I think you are overly focusing on issues that are not even on the minds of international property owners in the US.

That is one way to characterize it. Another way is that the US is a plutocracy where the interests of the rich walk over the interests of the poor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com