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Comment by ganoushoreilly | Hacker News Reader

When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison.

As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote.

The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's a whole other can of worms. It's become a i'll vote for your thing if you give me this thing, for every single vote and that's toxic and gross.

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If the US unfree market for automobiles (hello 2008) can't compete with Chinese state sponsored EVs, should we not do state subsidized EV and battery development here? Isn't electric transport that important?

If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?

My conspiracy theory would be that the US government doesn't want the citizen to have effective drones for surveillance and recon in the event of civil conflict. They want a Killswitch. (Totally crackpot but it sounds believable).

> If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?

Yes exactly. If some companies are doing things that you don't like, like misusing personal information and transferring it to other countries, it is much better to enact general laws that prevent that, as the EU is doing, rather than passing laws that ban individual Chinese companies.

It would be as if rather than regulating car safety, we had a situation where lots of cars by both US and foreign automakers had massive safety problems, but rather than fixing that in general, we simply chose to ban specific Chinese car brands on supposed national security grounds while ignoring that cars made by US companies had the exact same problems.

Your questions are right, but the conspiracy theory is dreadfully wrong. If you want a motivating force for banning, but not actually competing by leveling the field, it’s ideology. The US government doesn’t do subsidies (except when they do).

The saddest thing about these decline of American manufacturing, and the fragility of supply chains is that all of this was predicted 30 years ago, but Wall Street and the billionaire management class did their typical shortsighted profits taking instead of sustainability, soured on by ideological capture of both parties.

I often think about how the world would be different if the people actual won the Battle of Seattle.

I'm with you here. It's not a D/R thing it's a top bottom divide.

It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now they’re winning. Such a narrative couldn’t sit well with the US that poses as the poster child of laissez-faire capitalism (though often with heavy government interference of its own)

The Chinese government is playing the "kill competitors with price cuts" game on the national level by not floating their currency AND subsidizing their major international tech. Eventually someone will foot this bill. They hope the marbles they gain will be worth the cost.

so has this ever happened in the past, or just baseless speculation at this point? this thread is chock full of china experts telling us with certainly what china is going to do (justified with a lot of "just trust me bro") but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence

Nothing stopping the US government making big bets of its own. But perhaps it has in military tech. At any rate, the free market ideal has been proven as fallible as any ideal in practice

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