A correspondent and I had the following discussion, which ends up with a comment about traditional Chineseeconomics and the Great Divergence, both of which pertain to the Opium Wars:

Correspondent:

1. Until you are an Elon Musk or Bill Gates you are treated like an enemy of the government.  At what point does the government become your friend?  IRS is hounding American small and midsized companies all over the world.  

2. Thailand has off limits businesses for Thais and foreigners.  One is brewing beer.  You can sell your own beer outside of Thailand and on your own premises

I do wonder if governments hold down those who could compete.  

Yours truly: It’s true, once you’re big enough to pay to play with the politicians, you are probably going to be left somewhat alone. I think Apple pays something like a 2% tax rate in Ireland. The European Union being notoriously crooked, particularly the southern half, no doubt there are some behind the door shenanigans going on all over the place. Bribing foreign public officials used to be widely legal. Vive la France! But even then, I bet the bribes Apple has to pay to take advantage of favorable loopholes doesn’t amount to very much percentagewise.

As mentioned previously, when representative Weiner was finally dethroned for sending chickspictures of his schlong, I remember construction magnate Donald Trump saying on television, in so many words, that he was happy he would no longer have to pay off dicks like Weiner to get his construction projects up and going. We saw how much Obama’s Senate seat went for in Illinois (I think the bidding was something like $1 million when Blagojevich got caught) after he graduated to president. It’s always been this way though; in the past it was even worse. Abraham Lincoln of course stated publicly that there was no other way to getanything done in government unless bribery and influence peddling wereinvolved.

Governments always held people down. And China was a big malefactor in this regard throughout thecenturies, which is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe. However, the only reason it could take place in Europe was because there was no Roman Empire anymore and the place was fractured into different competing states. As such business people and intellectuals could flee from country to country when their one nation’s laws became too oppressive and their rulers too grasping. This is largely what the intellectual and financial/business history of Europe boils down to during the Middle Ages: a series of exoduses of people and their fiscal and cultural capital from one state to the next. For Chinese entrepreneurs and thinkers, options were much more limited, as there was usually nowhere else to go with a comparable level of civilization.