Cartoon Demands the government take over of businesses to do war crimes
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Germans had stuff from Ford Motor Co, too. There were reasons beyond simply "getting cheap cars for German consumers" that Volkswagon was founded.
Yeah, there's a reason it was dangerous to allow corporations to go transnational/globalist in the first place.
Where did the West go wrong? Somewhere in the "Merchant of Venice" era when the traders went from being near pariahs (and sharing a god with thieves), to respectable people.
I read the book Shogun years ago, which is about a 1600's Englishman stranded in Japan. One of the major themes is the clash of cultures and values between him and his hosts.
There's a scene that has always registered with me where a merchant has their stall and goods destroyed; I can't remember the cause. The main character tells his translator that this is terrible and she basically replies: "Why? This man produces nothing. He exploits the farmer who grows the food by buying it for a pittance and then marks it up, selling it to us for more than it's worth."
I do believe that the "middlemen" that move goods to market and retail them do provide some value, but it's always annoyed me that no matter the industry, the middlemen always seems to make much more money than the producer.
" Oh yes, the farmers and city people will surely be more wealthy once that pesky middle man is gone, right? He wasn't providing value to anyone! After all, the people can just travel to the countryside and buy their produce direct from the farmer.
Wait, wait, you're telling me that isn't feasible? That there will be a massive loss of efficiency in the economy? That crops will rot in the fields? Okay, what we need is for government to collect all the produce and distribute it at a fair price. What price is that? Well, we have these experts... "
And I'm sure you know how well that sort of system will work out. My point is that the merchant is providing economic value by being the middleman, and moreover the notion that he is not is typical of leftist thought.
In a properly functioning free market the end consumer decides how much the service the middleman is providing is worth. That service includes connecting producers to consumers, taking on the cost and risk of carrying inventory, opportunity cost, and more. Those services are in fact extremely valuable, both to the producer and to the consumer. If you think about it a bit you'll see why. For example, how much are a farmer's crops worth to him if they rot in his field? How much is a watermelon that you have to walk 10 miles to buy worth?
Now don't get me wrong, there absolutely are cases where the middlemen abuse the system through anti-competitive behaviors like collusion, monopolies, and so forth, and I do believe in (minimal) regulation to prevent those exploits.
From all that I've studied of history, it seems undeniable that cultivating a strong business class & commercial traditions definitely goes a long way to making a country strong. It's how the Italian & Dutch maritime powers were able to punch way above their weight for centuries (Venice vs. the Byzantines and the early Netherlands vs. Spain + Portugal, respectively). America, of course, was not only at its strongest but also most prosperous - for everyone, not just the uppermost crust of society - when the middle class was thriving. And China was approaching an early industrial revolution under its most innovative and merchant-friendly dynasty, the Song, who had set up what we might recognize as a proto-capitalist system with the world's first paper money, joint-stock companies, etc.
It's difficult to imagine a world where the Song got to continue on that trajectory instead of being crippled by the Jurchens & then obliterated by the Mongols. It would, at minimum, certainly have been a world where China consistently remains the top world power. As it was, instead China historically got centuries of stagnation under the neo-Confucian Ming and then oppression & ridiculous amounts of corruption (even by Chinese imperial standards) under the Qing. The same is true of Korea (more neo-Confucian stagnation) and Japan (stagnation under the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate, ultimately broken by Matthew Perry after said stagnation left them in the West's dust technologically).