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To: Zhang Fei; anymouse
"Production decision are made by companies responding to consumer demand rather than central planners dictating what consumers will get."

That is true to great extents, but they are still ultimately answerable to the PLA. Working conditions in many of the shops there amount to conditions of slavery.


33 posted on 12/04/2014 6:24:05 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
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To: familyop
That is true to great extents, but they are still ultimately answerable to the PLA. Working conditions in many of the shops there amount to conditions of slavery.

That's the way they are in low-wage countries. Anyone who wants to improve conditions there by employing workers under conditions a worker in a high-wage country would be comfortable with, is certainly free to do so. Work conditions have got nothing to do with capitalism or the lack thereof. The conditions under which workers toiled during the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution can only be described as Dickensian, but the system was no less capitalistic for being so spartan in its treatment of the labor force.

Working conditions in China prior to the Communist Revolution were certainly no better than conditions afterwards. The key change was post-revolution, everyone had an incentive go goof off because to work too hard was pointless, given that everyone else got the same rations regardless of output.

The principal difference between capitalism and communism is that the market, rather than central planners, sets prices and production quantities.

40 posted on 12/04/2014 7:17:18 PM PST by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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