[devoply]

Looks like though this is the future. It's Capitalism where you love a product, say freedom of speech or democracy, but the company that supplies it gets bought out. And now you can't get that product anymore because it's not a part of the new company's corporate strategy. It's the same thing really. All these companies get bought out by the Chinese. Same thing goes for natural resources and the environment. They are just being bought out. Get things you need while supplies last.

It would be interesting to see Trump pass a law prohibiting any US company from doing this... from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

[luckylion]

> from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

How would it be decided that they do it to support China and not, say, to cater to an outraged domestic group that makes noise? Will that become a game of "connect the policy change to China in five hops or less" to determine whether it's against the law?

[el_cujo]

I'm not a huge fan of capitalism, but it's a bit of a stretch to call this situation a failure of capitalism when the whole debacle exists because the Chinese government is making demands of Apple, which is not very capitalist. It doesn't really make sense to attack the ideology using an example where the ideology isn't really in practice, unless your point is that capitalism fails because it isn't flexible enough to work in a world where it does not reach 100% adoption. If so, fair enough, but I think that same criticism applies to every other economic system.

[devoply]

What if on the other hand this is the fundamental aspect of Capitalism... Where the people with capital are always telling other people who might want access to whatever they are holding, money, markets, production, whatever, that if they don't kowtow they won't do business with them. And no one talks about it, just like no one talked about all the Chinese hacking so as not to ruin their reputation and anger China.