Xi Jinping personally halted Ant's IPO after Jack Ma snubbed government leaders

Re:Xi Jinping personally halted Ant's IPO after Jack Ma snub... by simonh on Saturday November 14, 2020 @06:50AM (#25091748)

Democracy and the rule of law provide a considerable level of predictability. Google knew they couldn't work in the UK, but knew that they could succeed in California. Not everywhere needs to be conducive to every type of business or opportunity, as long as people and capital are free to flow to the places they can be effectively used for a given purpose. Fundamentally Capitalism is simply individual equal freedom of action within the law, freedom of association and respect for property rights. All the rest of capitalism just flows from respect for those basic principles.

The problem with authoritarianism is that not only does it have all the regulatory limiting problems of free capital democracies, but you also can't even rely on those rules, at all, because a leader can overrule them at a whim at any time.

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Re:Xi Jinping personally halted Ant's IPO after Jack Ma snub... by mcny on Saturday November 14, 2020 @07:02AM (#25091796)

» Google knew they couldn't work in the UK, but knew that they could succeed in California.

Sort of tangentially related, this reminds me of a story (not sure if it is true, I don't even remember the source for it) that movie-making became centered in California because the creative people wanted to not be forced to follow some onerous patents of camera manufacturers or something.

Edit: Wikipedia article for Hollywood also says this:

» In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving out west to Los Angeles, where attempts to enforce Edison's patents were easier to evade.

The citation is http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3871.html

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