Who decides whether TikTok stays Chinese, is banned or sold? Washington. Who determines whether an American or Japanese company gets to buy
United States Steel? Washington. Who is giving Intel $8.5 billion to make semiconductors in the U.S.? You get the picture.
Across the U.S., business decisions once made in boardrooms or shareholder meetings increasingly depend on politics. The U.S. isn’t sliding toward socialism, in which the government controls the means of production. It may, however, be slouching toward state capitalism, in which government regularly intervenes in business to ensure it serves the national interest.
The problem, as both the TikTok and U.S. Steel affairs show, is that the national interest is constantly being redefined to fit the political priorities of the day.
While the U.S. has never been a laissez-faire paradise, more than other countries it believed in free-market capitalism and let efficiency and profits determine the allocation of capital.
Neither Donald Trump nor President Biden believe in that. Both are happy to use all the levers of the federal government, whether taxes, subsidies, regulations or the bully pulpit, to tilt business decisions toward their own vision of the national interest.
When the House of Representatives voted to force the sale or ban of TikTok, the short-video app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, China’s Ministry of Commerce demanded, according to Xinhua, that the U.S. “earnestly respect the market economy and the principle of fair competition, and provide an open, fair, just and nondiscriminatory environment for enterprises from all countries.”
@ISIDEWITH1mo1MO
Warren Buffet was asked what he thought of tariffs. He said, tariffs are tax on the consumer but we can't let whole industries get wiped out by countries with no environmental laws and labor laws, and I agree with that.
The real question is how much State intervention is too much?
When it’s rife with corruption from the onset…. Either we ban the entire sector based on a logical premise or we don’t. If Americans are that gullible and mentally flaccid to be influence by blips of cartoonish like behavior then we don’t only need to ban ticktock we need to ban procreation until we institute a draft into the service corps (all of them).
Although I’m not a fan of the government picking winners and losers, TikTok is a subversive and dastardly system used by Beijing ostensibly to both spy on and directly influence Americans, fomenting discord.. It should have been banned years ago.
Just like it is in China.
@Equ4lRightsLeahGreen1mo1MO
Wrong fact being claimed. It is in China and not banned. However it is vastly different. It is not a mind destroying cesspit there, it is not allowed to be.
Why is the western version so different?
@ISIDEWITH1mo1MO
@ISIDEWITH1mo1MO
…President Biden’s “reward work, not wealth,” is not misguided or misinformed but just as ignorant and stupid as 44 who doubled our public debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in eight years of anemic ~1% growth with more public spending than all 43 presidents before combined.
The peace and prosperity, the true progress of an America free since its founding, never cost us what eight long years of low intellect 44’s sophistry cost us.
Reckless profligate spending hasn’t stopped since including a Republican in the White House through a pandemic with debt now… Read more
Well obviously there has not been enough state intervention against China yet. We barely got started when Trump had the coconuts to actually do something instead of just talking about it as usual.
Here is your yardstick: China stops their "we are a poor developing nation" schtick. They reverse the forced 50-50 local joint venture rubbish. The economic harm from that is resolved to the satisfaction of the involved foreign parties. We address their IP theft in a meaningful way. I think handing over control of theft based outfits like Huawei would be a good start. There is a harsh penalty period that reverses all the bad actor stuff in proportion to how long it has been going on.
Oh yes, and we ignore all the apologists with their "but these companies chose to go to China." Not acceptable, blackmail bad m'kay.
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