• ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Corruption-free is when you have a government that works hand in glove with corporations to protect their interests and you have a revolving door between politics and mahogany row.

    Corruption-free is when most corruption has been legalised through regulatory capture.

    Corruption-free is when your supranational organisation is opaque, anti-democratic, and riddled with lobbyists.

    You’re not really going to tell me that there aren’t countless examples of government corruption in Western Europe that I could point to, are you?

    Keep in mind that China’s population is 1.4 billion. Whichever country you happen to live in, I can tell you right now that its population pales in comparison. Of course there are going to be cases of corruption when you have a population that large.

    • N1cknamed
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      1 year ago

      The EU is of course famous for not protecting consumer interests or regulating corporations. They never do such a thing.

      Compared to the US, where the government does everything in its power to protect the status quo of the wealthy, or China, where the people can’t even vote for, let alone criticize their own government, European countries seem to be making quite a good effort to accommodate the will of the common man.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        That’s a lot of whataboutism and goalpost-shifting that you’re doing there. I never claimed that the EU doesn’t ever pass consumer protection laws or that they never regulate corporations.

        In fact, implicit in my argument about regulatory capture is the notion that there exists regulatory bodies who are performing the function of regulation of the market whose interests get perverted by the appointment of business people and executives, often from the exact same industries which said regulatory body oversees. So pointing out that regulatory bodies regulate in the EU is no more proof to the contrary of the existence of regulatory capture than using ice-skates on a hockey rink disproves the fact that ice-skates are designed for use on ice.

        You must be pretty across China to be able to make a call like “let alone criticize their own government”.

        I take it that you don’t consider the White Paper Protests to be criticisms of the Chinese government and its COVID policy for some reason? Have you just not looked into this protest or is there some other reason why it’s not an example of Chinese citizens voicing criticisms of their government?

        And as for elections, China has them. (Remind me again how people are elected to the European Commission, the Secretariat of the European Parliament, the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives…)