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Comment by mrexcess | Hacker News Reader

> You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions.

Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires. Between 2003 and the mid 2010s it EXECUTED at least 15 billionaires.

When was the last time a US billionaire faced a death penalty case, even when their actions directly result in tens of thousands of innocents dying?

Isn’t the US much more aligned with the dreams of the capital class, given that distinction alone? All the money in the world won’t save a Chinese citizen from their laws. Meanwhile, we have the President’s family selling crypto coins and NFTs and Trump Gold Cards and “produced by USA” Trump phones made in China.

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You're putting capital on a higher hill than the political class. That's not always the case.

Billionaires are problematic by their very existence, but the sort of power they want is what the CCP has. They want to use their capital to build that. Trump's having the best luck so far. If there are people who also just happen to be extremely wealthy who get in their way, they'd gladly use the power they then had to get rid of them. Alex Karp would be a good example of this sort of aspirational melding of the state and capital.

In a way, the CCP is beyond someone with a lot of money being able to do anything about it, which would be nice, except for the fact that they're totalitarian.

Comparisons between CCP and private industry in the West seems misaligned in several respects. CCP does not have fiduciary duty to shareholders, instead, it has accountability to national political goals as well as broad based economic outcomes.

This is a much different model. Yes, the CCP has the sort of power that elite authoritarians crave, but it also has constraints and demands that no elites would ever face.

I would add that China also executes quite a few government officials for corruption and bribery. Estimates based on reporting suggest that about 25 Chinese officials each year are executed for this, and over 200,000 have been prosecuted in serious criminal trials, often with multi decade prison sentences or even life sentences. Again, the contrast with Western permissiveness is stunning.

Of course it has fiduciary duty to shareholders. If they don't set up deals that investors want, they can't continue to exist. Is it something that they can be sued for in a court? No, but it's just how markets work.

As far as the execution of government officials for bribery, they also do quite a bit of other enforcement action that "Western permissiveness" just wouldn't tolerate, like sending ordinary people - not billionaires or cadre members - to re-education camps for wrongthink.

China does not have “shareholders”, though. There are incredibly substantive differences between the accountability structures and expectations of shareholders, and those that govern broad based and diverse national geopolitical interests in China.

China’s government is likewise not accountable to or easily fit into the framework of “a market”, for reasons not the least of which include it being explicitly anti-capitalist. Wealth hoarding does not accumulate political power in China, and those who attempt this play can and regularly do find themselves put back in their place - possibly a prison or a crematorium.

As for re-education “camps”, the US imprisons approximately 10% of its population - a huge number by any standards historical or contemporary - and virtually none of these are billionaires or governing elites, who are functionally immune to the systems of authority that “rehabilitate” regular Americans.

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