The treatment of Ma compared to his equivalent in the US (probably Bezos or Musk?) might be one of the neatest illustrations of genuine ideological difference between the two countries.
"In 2018, 51,302 new startups were founded. Last year, that number was down to 1,202."
That's the cost of authoritarian centralization. But it would also be dishonest not to concede the other side of the ledger. A government that eliminates all challenges to its authority also doesn’t depend on coalitions or election cycles, so doesn’t need to bargain with public-sector unions, entrenched lobbies, or party factions to stay in power. That concentration of authority can give Beijing a longer planning horizon than governments that live inside a permanent 18-month election cycle.
That’s the structural trade-off:
fewer constraints and more long-term maneuvering room, at the price of suppressing bottom-up initiative, i.e. entrepreneurship.
This is not a value judgment: it’s just the logic of political institutions. Centralized regimes can move quickly, avoid gridlock, and pursue 20- or 30-year industrial policy. But the same mechanisms that let them think long-term also deter the kind of decentralized experimentation that produces new firms and new ideas.
Your comment is just another illustration that many people have so little experience with an actual dictatorship to not realize the difference. The US isn't perfect but that's a start contrast to an actual dictatorship. For now at least.
I’ll say the same is true for those that hold your point of view.
When the public or a segment are signaling concern about a dictatorship, it’s an alarm and signal that they see signs.
What is misunderstood: Once the dictator secures power, it’s far too late. The critics are long silenced, and all of the checks and balances have been hollowed out and made powerless.
They boy who cried wolf. We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.
Saying the former when the reality is the latter means your message will simply becomes ever more ignored the closer to a dictatorship we get and thus makes a dictatorship more likely.
> I’ll say the same is true for those that hold your point of view.
I aways find it so interesting that having a view that aims to be based on reality and not overly exaggerated fear mongering is seen as so negatively by both sides. I can't see that ending well for the US to be honest. Fear mongering is how you get dictators, left or right, and not how you get a stable democracy.
> We are a dictatorship and we are headed towards a dictatorship are not the same thing.
While there is truth in that, it is also important to note that there is no such thing as a clear-cut line where we go, ok this is it, now it's a dictatorship.
Which in turn means that it becomes easy to rationalize and say that because they aren't doing this or that yet, it can't be a dictatorship yet. And those goalposts keep moving.
So perhaps one analogy is like a recession. We never really know the economy is in a recession until it's already been in one for a while but it wasn't obvious yet, only in hindsight.
I find it fascinating that saying "we're not yet an actual dictatorship" is seen as complacency.
> Of course, my family escaped a dictatorship and made our home in the US. So we have a better sense of these things.
Fascinating what people assume about others and then use that to discount the views of others if those views disagree with them.
Clearly you've got a lot of trauma but panic and excess anxiety are not healthy responses to that as they make your decisions irrationally biased. That's how you get lots of immigrants who escaped communist dictatorships voting for a right wing dictatorships in the US. Their trauma biases their world view so much that they panic and then cause an equally bad outcome.
In a dictatorship this happens indeed. And there's nothing you can do about it.
In the US people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc. It is unfortunate that someone is trying to become dictator, but the point of this country is that it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that.
> people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc.
It's actually pretty normal for modern dictatorships to have all that too. During eras where common people and peer nations appreciate democracy and liberalism, the typical way of operating a dictatorship is to allow for nominal expression of all those things but to structure in limits on its efficacy. They happen, they're just made sure never exceed the regime's capacity to rein them in, and sometimes are even instigated by the regime as an alternative means of influence.
> it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that
Sure. And it also doesn't only become a dictatorship when those things are no longer visible. If you only see dictatorship as some abstract platonic ideal of complete repression of dissent, instead of as a concentration of power effectively beyond the reach of the demos and its guardian institutions, you'll miss most of its occurrences in the real world.
Not like Germans didn't fight the nazis. Their road to power was littered with the corpses of liberty and actual people.
But its not so much trump I'm concerned about, its the people using him (though he is using them in some kind symbiotic relationship), and that is project 2025, federalist society, christo fascist tech billionaires like Thiel, or even the CEO of ycombinator, that supports them, etc. There's a chance it could end with trump, they know that, so they're working on making sure it doesn't.
I understand. And I hope you are doing your part to fight what you perceive to be the bad guys. Because, you realize that if you do nothing, and everyone does the same as you, then we all deserve our ultimate fate, one of subjugation and dictatorship.
Fortunately, here in the US, one can still do stuff, and that action can actually move the needle. In China, you can do nothing. If you don't like what Xi is doing, tough luck.
My point is: it is very fashionable here on HN to complain about how the US is bad, or a tyranny, or unjust, or whatever. But out of all the countries in the world, the US still has the highest aversion to dictatorship and tyranny. People do fight. Look at Harvard. Columbia didn't fight, but Harvard did. Some people fold, but some fight.
The founding idea of the US is that people are imperfect. Some will always try to grab power. That's human nature. The solution is to have multiple checks and balances. They will not create a perfect society, but they'll reduce the likelihood of one group of people to take over, as it happened with the Nazis in the inter-war period in Germany. Just checks and balances are not enough, it's also the democratic tradition. It's the people willing to take a stand. And fortunately, such people still exist.
