Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos
- In 1999, Jack Ma started a business in his cramped apartment in Hangzhou, China
- He worked hard, overcame setbacks, focused on serving customers, and became China's richest person
- Then, in October 2020, Ma spoke at an event in Shanghai and said that innovation mainly comes from the marketplace
- Regulators should "supervise" innovation, but not try to "manage" it
- The Chinese government blocked the IPO of Ant, an Alibaba affiliate, and opened an antitrust investigation of Alibaba itself
- Alibaba has since been restructured and fined $2.5 billion
- Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, and has taken to denouncing the Biden administration’s handling of inflation, accusing the government of displaying “a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics”
- As an American, Bezos is free to speak his mind, and therefore free to criticize the government
Amazon is a ruthlessly self-critical organization
- Attention always turn[s] to the ways in which [employees] could have done better."
- The firm also encourages disagreement. Conflict yields results.
- This approach does not sit well with the left-wing activists who now set antitrust policy for the federal government.
China’s Orwellian State Surveillance
- State surveillance in China was widespread even before COVID-19, and it has expanded during the pandemic
- Facial recognition software is being used to suppress dissidents opposed to the lockdowns
- A collateral victim of Chinese oppression is the Chinese economy
- Restaurants are closed, factories are shuttered, travel is tightly restricted, and, unsurprisingly, unemployment is rising
- China's economic growth will likely continue to languish at around 3 percent-lower than the state's already scaled-back target
https://www.city-journal.org/america-china-and-the-spirit-of-enterprise
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