Thread by @Freesoilyeah

I hear people who were saying "China has X or Y problem", and my thought is it doesn't matter because China has a sovereign acting national government, the US doesn't.

Meaning that if there's some problem, the Chinese government, being an oligarchy, can respond quickly to

problems. What seemed obvious to me is the purpose of the state is as "the sword and hammer of the nation". Where the disparate resources can be concentrated at focal points.

If the state makes an error, like, I dunno, building a giant city that nobody moved to, they can recover

Because the oligarchy can look at it, realize it was a mistake, and then do whatever needs to be done to deal with that mistake. In the US, being a democracy, say they make a similar problem (obviously scaled down for the smaller population) - okay, what is the mechanism to...

first recognize it's a problem, and second, who loses money in order to fix the problem? Because in the US you have competing agencies who want to keep their funding, firms controlling politicians to shovel contracts and subsidies, and politicians trying to get re-relected.

If an empty city was built in the US, you just know it would be an on-going mess. They couldn't just tear it down, politicians would try to deny the problem lest they look like fools and get voted out. In China you don't have real elections, so the regime can take hits.

If you've ever played a grand strategy game, it's like China is a player, while the US is an AI. The AI does a whole bunch of pre-scripted thing that's a result of it's internal coding. China has a small cadre of people running things. Industry for them is a TOOL of the state.

And in their economic policy, they kept doing all of these "bad policies" of protecting their internal markets with currency manipulation, tariffs and straight up import bans. And so now they make everything and decide who gets stuff and at what price.

China's like Bane, the US is like the businessman who gave Bane a lot of money. "But I have a piece of paper saying I own all this stuff in China!"

"And you think that gives you power over me?"

Critical medicine - MADE IN CHINA!!! Wooo.

The sad state the US is in is what happens when you don't have leadership that treats their country as a nation, but as some sort of profit-maximizing playground with little long-term consideration of the global balance of power.

So far, history was written by western journalists. What was written in newspapers became "the history", and "historians" have been -for the most part with some exceptions particularly with military history- little more than compilers of old media reports.

In a strange way, this may end when, in the future, people just go "who the fuck cares what the western press thinks? I want to know what the Chinese think. They have a functional government that seriously seeks to solve problems and invest in their people."