[coliveira]

> This basically is exactly the strategy of China, at least with respect to international trade, and it's working absolutely wonderfully for them.

if that is the case, then the US has no grounds on requesting the Chinese to open their markets for US firms! If the US is itself committed to empower their oligarchic companies, we should not be surprised if the Chinese create their own mega companies and close their market to the American ones.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that if we go the path of supporting mega companies, then we should just throw away the illusion of free market and understand that other countries will do the same, because they're not stupid.

[creato]

> If the US is itself committed to empower their oligarchic companies,

I think this is a silly strawman and you probably know it. This argument exists on a wide spectrum, at one end is "not acting to break up large companies", and at the other is "outright state owned enterprises with unlimited funding to compete abroad". The fact that the argument applies to both does not make them the same.

[coliveira]

It is not a strawman when we're talking about the US trying to "protect" giant and unhinged companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, ExonMobil, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. In fact what happens is the opposite, these companies are in large part controlling the country, which puts us in a similar situation as the Chinese.