It’s also a bit different when you’re catching up due to interference/imperialism by foreign countries (like the US) in your country’s affairs from the past 100+ years.

Why wouldn’t the state help develop its industries?

Just because somebody practiced imperialism against you in the past doesn't make you free from moral responsibility.

China's government is responsible only for its population. Moral responsibility isn't universal contrary to what liberalism says. This is a major, morally disarming agent that has turned pathological in NW Europe and US. What imperialism taught China is what the stick-end of liberalism feels like.

China was very much in a similar situation pre-WW2, significantly worse infact.

We are talking about 75 billion for a single company, not just any support for any tech company. It’s scale that makes it interesting, like comparing a bottle rocket vs a manned spaceship.

The US spends $1 trillion on defense each year. A large component of that money is fuelling the military industrial complex, basically suppoort for the domestic industry. And it isn't just limited to the "classical" military companies. Look up how the CIA helped Oracle.

That trillion dollars for “defense” also includes keeping global shipping lanes open and maintaining a military able to respond to existing treaty commitments across Europe. Seems to be a reasonable deal for some of they money to stay here in US companies if we’re paying for so much of others’ security abroad.

The global shipping lanes are kept open for US and US ally interests for which the US is compensated. Every country that has a US base on their soil pays the US military for being there (exceptions being war ravaged or active battle zones)

What they pay does not offset the total costs of maintaining these facilities, and these allies still levy significant import duties on US goods that traverse these shipping lanes, so I don’t know what point you’re trying to make other than pendantry.

Lockheed Martin had $51 billion in government contracts in 2017 alone. Their total revenue that year was a whole $54 billion. This article is complaining about Huawei getting $75 billion over many years.

Lockheed Martin got contracts of which perhaps 5-8% (2.6B to 4B) is profit, this is more direct funding. $75 billion in tax breaks etc is more like a 750B contract in terms of growth potential. Which is why I am saying this is such a huge amount of money rather than unfair or anything.

PS: Oddly, when bidding large federal contracts you include profit margin as a line item. Past 8% is possible, but starts to raise red flags.

When US still supported its non-welfare industries (and allowed smoking) they put a man to the moon.

What you said is 100% true, but of course you're getting down voted because China=bad and America=good.

People don't seem to realize the USA has poured billions of dollars into Boeing, Hewlett-Packard Company, Honeywell, GE, IBM, etc. etc

Those companies wouldn't have nearly the global presence they do if the government contracts hadn't paid for billions in R&D over the decades.

Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...

Please keep the swipes about downvotes out of your HN comments. Those break the site guidelines. They also usually end up being wrong. In this case, the GP has been heavily upvoted, but your comment lingers on adding wrong information and noise to the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html