A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish
Wouldn’t go that far…
It’s hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality and the wealthiest run the government.
China is socialist. Socialism is serving as the stepping stone on the path from the previous system to full Communism. Socialism serves as an important developmental stage as antagonisms from within (counter-revolutionary forces) and without (imperialist powers) are resolved.
It’s hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality
First, China does have wealth inequality, but its middling in its severity.
(The key is on the linked Wikipedia page, but darker has higher income inequality).
China has a Gini index of 38.2% in 2019, putting them at 71 out of 168 in national rankings. The USA has a Gini index of 39.4% in 2020, putting them at 107 out of 168. (Lower Gini index, and lower ranking are better). The worst nation, South Africa, has a Gini index of 63.0% as of 2014; the best nation, the Faroe Islands, has a Gini index of 22.71% as of 2018[1].
Moreover, wealth inequality has been decreasing in China for about a decade[2], whereas our point of reference, the USA, has seen its inequality steadily increase over the same time span[3]. Wealth inequality is also not unexpected in a rapidly developing economy such as China: initially, as the economy grows, certain people financially benefit more than others and wealth inequality increases; over time as the economic growth stabilizes, and with a concerted effort to combat it, wealth inequality levels out and then decreases, as we see happening. Income inequality is not automatically horrible: careful attention needs to be paid to the bottom of the income rankings; comparatively, high wealth inequality is less of a problem if the bottom is not in poverty than if they are. This ties in to my next point,
the wealthiest run the government.
This is not true at all. Wealth does not buy political power or influence within the CPC (or indeed in the Chinese government overall); nor does having power or influence in the CPC enable one to amass more wealth. Those who are wealthy work with the party, as members, to further the goals of the Party to improve everyone’s lives, rather than working selfishly against the party to further their own personal goals. To paraphrase Boer[4], “The private entrepreneurs have not become a class in itself with associated class consciousness, but many have become CPC members or non-party supporters. The social and cultural assumption is that those that have benefited from wider support must contribute to the well-being of others”. That is, those who are wealthy do not get to exert outsized influence by way of being wealthy, and do not sit back and glorify their wealth, but instead work by giving back and improving the well-being of others.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual “socialist responsibility reports” which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Socialism (and indeed communism) is a structural form that dictates a government’s (and economy’s) purpose and its relation to society and its members. The goal of a socialist government is to improve the material and cultural lives of its people. To a Westerner, it seems foreign or fantastical that a country could genuinely operate with this goal in mind, and so people would rather say “it’s not real socialism”, or say that “because it has some problems, it’s all bad”, than to acknowledge that no system is perfect and as long as the system works to fix its issues and help its people, it is on the right track.
The OP has a non-nuanced and seemingly uninformed opinion on China as well,
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
They are not capitalist. Infrastructure spending is also not what determines whether they are capitalist, socialist, or something else. Moreover, nobody is arguing that a strong central government determines whether they are communist or not. To say that China is capitalist is a category error and falls into the trap that dictates that using aspects of a market economy automatically negates socialism and makes a system capitalist. I’ve written a bit more in depth on it elsewhere, but plenty of sources dive in to why China is indeed socialist and why it is faulty to see them as capitalist. Chapter 5 (“China’s Socialist Market Economy and Planned Economy”) from Richard Boer’s book I’ve cited above serves as a good overview of why it is a category error to call China capitalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality ↩︎
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2019&locations=CN&start=1990&view=chart ↩︎
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2019&locations=US&start=1990&view=chart ↩︎
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Boer, Roland. ↩︎
China is socialist
Lol
They are. Technically. It’s the most warped twisted definition of socialism. But being socialist isn’t what’s important in ML Communist regimes. They, like their mirror on the right. The fascists. Are all about authority and authoritarianism.
The biggest problem for most of us westerners trying to understand this. Is that we are propagandized and indoctrinated to view left and right as being about social issues. And that thou shall have no economy before God but capitalism. And that socialism does not exist as anything other than a boogeyman to scare us with. We are not taught in schools what socialism actually is beyond Marxist-Leninist communism bad. And as a socialist while I do agree that Lenin’s monster he is indeed quite bad. And that while reading the philosophy and theory of Marx he managed to make all the worst possible interpretations. His version of communism doesn’t even define all of communism let alone all of socialism. But it is still technically socialism.
China doesn’t even have a free healthcare system. Everyone still needs to pay, even though there are subsidies. In real life, there’s little difference between the US and China
Socialism doesn’t require that. So that does not make it any less socialist. As a socialist however. I would argue that since Karl Marx’s time. The concept of health care has become a much more important notion to the welfare of the general populace that should include universal health care. It isn’t part of the definition however.
Good reply, thank you.
And I’ll defer to your categorization and consider the reading recommendation.
I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed… unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.
The responses yesterday seemed to think China is just giving away money. They aren’t.
Also: all developed nations are socialist. What people argue over is where lines are drawn.
My issue is that you said they’re capitalist. They’re not. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. When I said they’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.
I also don’t know what you meant about a “strong central government” not making them communist. That seems like a strawman. Nobody would say that a strong central government makes it communist, or a lack of a strong central government means it’s not communist. “Strong” with no other qualifies is also not very useful: do you mean tough and resilient, or do you mean controlling?
I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed… unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.
This is a trap that people keep falling in to. Just because a socialist country doesn’t do “good thing X” doesn’t mean it’s not socialist. No system is perfect; the difference is that the CPC makes strong plans, sticks to them, and publishes progress reports to address the problems that do arise. Should the state be taking the burden here where family currently is? Perhaps. But it’s failure to do so doesn’t mean the system isn’t socialist. Again, I’ll repeat my earlier statement: being “socialist” is a statement that is about the purpose of the government and the relation of the government to its people; it is socialist if it is for the benefit of the people en masse. Being “socialist” is not a statement of a utopic ideal antithesis to capitalism.
If you truly are willing to read about this, the book I mentioned is a good overview of China as it exists, as an implementation of a socialist society, at a level that does not require previous knowledge of theory or of China. Being intended for a foreign audience, it makes a concerted effort to address common misconceptions held by those outside of China about China. It’s also very heavily sourced: each chapter ends with several pages of citations used in that chapter, including primary sources from CPC members, official government documents, analysis and critiques, and “historical”/foundational texts.
If you don’t like them being called capitalist, then your quarrel is with a whole heap of people (and academics).
The question, like I alluded to earlier, isn’t whether they are capitalist, but a question of how much. And many, after careful study, have determined them to be capitalist.
Those determinations are based on measurable things and philosophy (somewhat).
Also: you are clearly not my original intended audience. In the referenced thread I was getting low-effort, glib comments that snowballed upvotes.
Not unlike the person who deemed me to be a republican. It’s easy to look at my post history.
I’m not a republican. But glib is easy. And glib, low-effort posters were the primary intended audience. Know-it-alls.
I’m going to make a glib comment; So they’re 25% capitalist and 30% socialist and 10% communist and the rest something else. It doesn’t mean they’re a primarily capitalist economy.
I get that you’re having a bit of fun. On a separate branch here, I make a similar point.
What people argue about is how much of one makes it “x.” They can seldom say it’s not capitalist, socialist or even communist.
We quibble over which side of a line it lands. And googling this lead to about a 50/50 split between capitalist and socialist.
I didn’t pull the idea that they’re capitalist out of my ass.
And all of the side stuff is people completely missing the article. It’s pedantic and cheap intellectual points and so rarely thoughtful or insightful.
Is lemmy usually this wannabe edgelord?
Aren’t all the reddit expats intentionally edgy by leaving reddit? You’ve got the cream on top.
Removed by mod
Thank you for posting this well sourced reply. I’m sorry that you’re being downvoted. Libs have an aneurysm anytime someone challenges their current world view. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is on my to read least and I may just have to start reading it tonight.
Well they are not wrong to criticize and reject ML communism. But they are however rather hypocritical.
Removed by mod
What’s the point of downvoting a reply that’s exactly on topic and fully sourced? Is it the redditors again?
Because people don’t like to read the opposite of what the West propaganda shows, it creates a cognitive dissonance with reality and their beliefs, and before questioning their beliefs, they choose to question reality.
I assumed it was downvoted by people who see China as being largely a state capitalist economy with a nominally socialist/communist government, whom I would guess are primarily lefties. Contrary to seeing it as western propaganda, they’d see it as Chinese propaganda as it pretends that the country is something it really isn’t.
This is only a possible view, of course.
They sourced gini information three times, and then cited what dollars-to-donuts is a propaganda work from someone that agrees with them. It’s on topic, but it’s also a lot of words to prop up a weak point.
You could say people should respond instead of downvote, but they also say to pick who you argue with carefully, because most arguments are a waste of time.
Fully sourced means my statements were sourced, not that it was dripping in sources.
Also, the book I cited is not propaganda. Please don’t resort to calling everything that posits an alternate view propaganda.
From the Springer page on the book,
Roland Boer is a professor in the School of Marxism Studies at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.
So he has a degree in and is a professor in the exact subject he’s talking about, from a respected University:
Dalian University of Technology (DUT) […] is a public research university located in Dalian, Liaoning, China, with an additional campus in Panjin, Liaoning. […] Formerly called the Dalian Institute of Technology, DUT is renowned as one of the Big Four Institutes of Technology in China. […] As of 2022, DUT was listed as one of the top 400 global universities in several major international universities’ rankings
Moreover, it’s not some random publisher or some guy’s PDF on the internet. It’s published by Springer which, if you have done any academic reading in almost any field, you will know that Springer content is high-quality and trustworthy. In fact, at a lot of the university libraries I’ve been in, some subjects (maths, especially) are probably three-quarters Springer publications,
Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.
Yep, a professor of Marxism in a state-run Chinese university, definitely sounds very neutral. /s
Springer is an academic publisher, but that doesn’t mean they agree with the viewpoints of every niche humanities publication in their catalogue. It’s sort of like how Penguin offers both Das Kapital and Mein Kampf (with a disclaimer that I’m not calling anyone a Nazi).
Please don’t resort to calling everything that posits an alternate view propaganda.
Even when propaganda is true it’s propaganda. Leftists are usually pretty good about acknowledging that, even.
I’m gonna say it’s because it’s a wall of text with mostly subjective or aspirational statements to rebut a cheap two sentence quippy post.
It would have been sufficient to simply state that China’ inequality problem is improving. If you have the free time for the wall-of-text route, demonstrating how concrete communist policies are directly leading to these improvements would have been much better than the “CCP works really hard to help people” fluff language.
Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107. It’s fair to say both countries have “rampant income inequality” right now. Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual “socialist responsibility reports” which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107.
I’m not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it’s 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn’t do. My point was they’re similar and middling in the ranking.
Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn’t that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it’s decreasing. The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”) in part because the issue doesn’t address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn’t magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.
Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn’t publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren’t doing what they said they would. You’re confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There’s a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it’s because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn’t have so much support for the party.
(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it’s ranking; inverting the sort order doesn’t make the countries less similar, and since they’re middling, inverting the sort order means they’re still middling. I didn’t make a claim that one was better than the other).
To get the 98 rather than 71 figure, you would sort by Gini index descending.
You literally have it backwards:
Sort Gini index by ascending: China is #98 at 38.2, US is #107 at 39.4
Sort Gini index by descending: US is #62 at 39.4 and China is #71 at 38.2.
It seems you’re right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn’t making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they’re similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they’re still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they’re still middling.
You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”)
There’s no truly free market. Every country has some level of regulation. In the US, many people point to tax rates as the cause of (and solution to) inequality. I think they’re correct but that’s also really stretching the definition of “regulation”.
The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans.
Every government bigger than a village generally does this. Every politician talks up what they’ve done because they want to keep power. China should be proud of its accomplishments but I’m sorry, there’s nothing unique or special to what you’re saying here.
If there’s a failure to follow through on campaign promises, it’s because the legislation failed to pass but that’s more about democracy than economics. I politely suggest we not go down that road in this thread :).
To view a text only version of CNN pages, replace “www” with “lite”. https://lite.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html is about 50 kB, whereas the original is about 2.7 MB.
It looks like there is two different things happening.
First is that the one child policy is causing problems with several grandparents being supported by one grandchild. In this case, it seems like the grandparents are paying a salary to their grandkid to support them in elderly care. It may not be a lot of money, but it seems to be enough for the adult grandchildren to live for what is effectively a part time job.
Second is that the economy going through issues, and grandparents are acting as unemployment insurance.
brb moving to China
You need to find Chinese parents first.
Or parents. Period.
Li, 21, now spends her days grocery shopping for her family in the central city of Luoyang and caring for her grandmother, who has dementia. Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
That just sounds like a caregiver. Laura He and Candice Zhu can eat shit if they do not think that is a real job. Caring for someone with dementia is not a walk in the park.
“Excess infrastructure spending” I’ve spotted the republican.
It sounds strange, but it is something that the Chinese national government has made policy to rein in. This includes a national ban on new skyscrapers and subway lines. If the national government has to ban different types of infrastructure to be built, it can be a sign of excessive spending.
As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.
Regarding subway lines, I can’t find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.
Here is an article in 2018 about China making it harder to build new mass transit:
Here is an article in 2021 about China effectively no longer building subway lines in cities without an existing system, mainly due to trying to corral the real estate bubble:
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008813
The Chinese national and regional governments don’t operate on the same economics or politics of Western governments, so the actions of one may not fully map to the actions of another.
Ad hoc and poison the well while being very wide of the mark, too.
Nicely done.
My politics align more with Sanders than anyone well known politician. Surplus is surplus and the left needs to retain the right to call a spade a spade.
Not all infrastructure spend is good. I’m both envious of what they have and stymied by articles documenting unused cities.
For ease of research, I recommend “China ghost cities.” Maybe those cities will make sense and not every idea has to work, but that is surplus, ergo excess.
Most of the things that you mention as “ghost cities” and so on are simply they building in the long term, for the people, so that they can be in a later time be populated. Here’s a good example of a YouTube channel who made a video about “ghost” metro station a few years ago, recently they did an update, and it is no longer a place without a purpose but actively being inhabited.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I get that they’re attempting to master plan and be ahead of things. I also know infrastructure is an investment - and sometimes it’s partially a jobs program.
Not every investment works out.
I’m not down on them.
I’m down on low-effort, glib and smug responses and I’m hitting more of it on Lemmy than I hit elsewhere. I’m not sure if this is the result of reddit leading to a population swing or if lemmy already had a lot of “smart” people who could be better than they are.
If I plan to smear someone. I click their post history. I’ve stopped myself from many errors and found a way to build a common ground. I’ve also found fools and decided they weren’t worth it.
But if I plan to be dismissive, I do the research.
If you’re getting consistently rolled in the place with all the smart people, have you considered the possibility that you say dumb stuff?
Really weird phrasing by cnn, and strange that the Chinese youth take it upon themselves online, since they’re performing work that is very common in China, being a nanny or a housekeeper, and getting paid in room and board. They aren’t “professional children,” they are professionals who happen to be the children of their employer.
Despite the youth working at home and being paid, the article keeps using the phrase" professional children" as if they’re being paid to act like children.
Totally aside from that, what makes you think the land use laws in China make China more communist? The US has essentially the same rules, that if you don’t name a beneficiary, your assets are often allocated to the state.
As far as I understand, as long as you name a beneficiary in China, the 70-year lease on your property/ real estate can be renewed indefinitely by any directly named beneficiary.
Is that correct as far as you understand real estate laws in China?
This is basically my understanding.
Got it. When you get down to the individual level, this is what real estate law is like concerning land ownership that I’m referring to.
“Each buyer registers his/her real estate title at the local registry and obtains a real estate certificate (or a land use right certificate and a building ownership certificate in transactions closed before 1 March 2015) in respect of the residential property he/she purchased. The buyer will enjoy ownership of the residential property for the remaining term of the 70-year land grant. Under PRC law, the buyer’s title will be automatically renewed at the end of the 70-year initial land grant (although the legal procedures for title renewal have not yet been legislated”
I’m a little lost here. By posting a section of what I linked… are you thinking you’re making a point?
I read it. I also know that the 70 year thing has only recently meant anything (the rule is slightly older than 70 years). As a practical matter, what you extracted is what makes sense.
Some will make more note of the parenthetical: “although the legal procedures for title renewal have not yet been legislated.”
That can also mean, stay in our good graces and things can go smoothly. In most other countries that specific concern isn’t a thing.
Officially owning the land and needing to re-authorize is different from eminent domain.
I don’t know about lost , but you do seem high-strung.
“As a practical matter, what you extracted is what makes sense.”
Yes, that’s why I extracted it, to clarify for you the 70-year real-estate law I had mentioned.
Chill out.
I remain a bit lost on why you think quoting my citation helped, but I have a theory. I see a lot of glib on lemmy. Are your usual sparring partners here that inept or clueless?
Honest question: are they? I’m still getting the hang of lemmy and so far it seems like a lot of self congratulatory wannabe-edgelord stuff.
Like it’s puffery with just enough citations for posters to think they’re smart?
And along the way, no citation is the right citation. I’m not lumping you into all this, I’m wondering if that’s what this is right now.
I don’t see people having discussions. I see people correcting each other on secondary points and missing the forest for the trees.
Edit: I didn’t need my citation clarified to me. That you think that’s what you did by quoting it is odd. If you added context, a link to why you think it’s a richer topic, I’m good with it and I enjoy learning.
But I had read it and did not need it read back to me.
The parenthetical part that you didn’t address was the key part. Being and staying in good graces is likely key to a seamless transition into the next 70 years. That’s different from eminent domain.
I asked for your take on real estate law as you understood it in China.
You provided a third-party tl;dr layman’s guide to Chinese real estate, indicating you were unable or unwilling to provide the personal take I asked you for. Which is fine, maybe you aren’t in the mood for conversation.
I pointed out the 70-year individual property leases I had mentioned as a matter of clarification and left it at that.
As for lemmy, I have had pretty good conversations with people here about music, video games, tech, the communities in general.
Easy to rile; I’m going to hazard a guess that it is your defensive, nervous and rude attitude that is inviting the edgelords to rub elbows with you.
Take a beat.
You don’t see the unnecessarily detrimental and argumentative hypocrisy of lamenting the masses “missing the forest for the trees” and then 1)harping on a subjective and contextually irrelevant parenthetical excerpt and 2)arguing against eminent domain existing in Chinese real estate as if you weren’t the one to bring up eminent domain in Chinese real estate and are not the only person making the case for or against that concept?
If not, you might be missing the forest for the trees.
One of the themes I’ve seen here is people saying someone said something they didn’t then taking issue with what they heard/inferred.
I didn’t say they don’t have eminent domain, as an example. I’m saying that the closest thing I’ve seen to their model is eminent domain - and even then, it’s different.
It’s as if people here are so keen to land a point that they invent one. I’ve been on a variety of fora for decades. The frequency of misrepresentation and zero fucks about making it right is… I’ve never seen it so prevalent. People act like they aren’t talking to people.
Straight Dope, people cared. Giraffe board (after the switch), people cared. StumbleUpon, Reddit… people cared that they were seen “arguing” in good faith. They curated their reputation by listening and if they fucked up, many (not all) would try to reset and some would apologize.
I’m not simply describing my experience. I’m describing threads or branches where all I do is read comments.
Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
So…they are unemployed?
It says right there there’s a salary. She’s nepotistically employed as a caregiver.
If you think that’s not a “real job”, that’s basically a cultural judgement, which I guess you can make, but then there’s dudes that think only steelworkers have a real job.
Please go read the article and don’t try to get triggered by things I didn’t say. JFC.
I did skim it. If you’re not saying it’s not a real job that just doesn’t apply to you, sorry for bringing it up.
Why would you want for young people to work? Is your idea for a utopia to have 15 year olds working at a McDonalds for minimum wage?
If the youth can focus on studying and improving themselves that is what they should do. Maybe it is because of the strong US “work ethics” but where I live unless you are under extreme poverty you focus on studying until you are 25 at least. We have free healthcare and education, so we have it much easier than people in the US, though.
She’s 21
I didn’t say she was 15, it was an example because that’s the reality in the US.
Nothing wrong with working after school when you’re 15, my friend worked a few hours scooping ice cream
Not everyone will use every waking hour studying
Yes, yes there is something wrong, I’m not saying you need to be every waking hour studying, but forcing young people to work is something would only happen under the current capitalist system and it is done to get cheap labour, not because of X or Y.
He wasn’t forced to work, he just wanted some spending money above what good parents have him. What’s wrong with that?
It’s not like scooping ice cream requires special skills
Shit, I’ve been in the wrong industry this whole time.
deleted by creator
Err, what? Look at pot “legalization”. It’s still technically illegal but states don’t care. You’ll see billboards about it down the highway. Previously we had a patchwork of which states had gay marriage, even when DOMA was on the books. Then there’s the whole “sanctuary city” thing where support isn’t given to Federal officers.
The Federal government might be stronger than the founders intended but it’s not that strong compared to other countries. It’s a miracle we all drive on the same side of the road.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Let’s not pretend how trust fund babies work in the US
Is everyone just a Capitalist deep down inside?
No, and to paint everything this way serves to delegitimize alternatives to capitalism. China is not capitalist, they are socialist. They have their own problems, because no system is perfect. But there are alternatives to capitalism, and not everything is “secretly capitalism in disguise”.
There’s no true Scotsman. China is both and neither. The US is both and neither. You need to talk about specific policies as one or the other.
Greed and envy (the roots of capitalism) are basic human drivers that we all have. It takes a lot of discipline, ethics, and an altruistic moral code or belief system to negate that. Some individuals are capable of that, but there is no societal system that has been able to overcome it.
We would never be able to completely move away from a capitalist system because it’s in our nature to want more, to be rewarded for our efforts, and to be jealous of others. It’s also why alternative systems never work as intended - the greed turns into corruption and ends up ruining the system.
The best outcome is to establish guardrails that limit the extent of the greed that is allowed in the system.
