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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies, and helped flood the market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?

There's a lot of data around that in the history of the US and Japan?

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For the first part, yep. Samuel Slater (known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" in the US, but "Slater the Traitor" in the UK) was the most well known example, but was also simply one piece of a large policy of ignoring European parents and encouraging people to come with 'stolen technology' to the US and make a competing company here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

Also, the Chinese are absolutely making a profit on their exports, so I'd question your "below cost" broad characterization.

> The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies... market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?

NSA spied on Airbus in the 90s and passed along information to Boeing and MacDonell Douglas - paving the way for the latter to win a Saudi deal, over Airbus. Further, Boeing airliner development is subsidized by military purchases of its jets by the US government. Its easy to forget that increasing the influence of and/or financially benefitting American champions falls under the auspices of "National interest"

See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. Concern for IP tends to come _after_ a country develops.

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