[abhigupta]

"If you want to know who rules over you look at who you are not allowed to criticize"

[magicsmoke]

You can criticize China, but then you lose their dollars.

So in the end, the thing that rules over you is actually money.

[maxharris]

There's a difference between a who and a what.

Also consider: you can ask a PRC official what they think, and you'll get a response. Try to do the same thing to a pile of money? Crickets.

[traderjane]

That's not obvious at all in any place in the world.

[ytch]

Same as China and USA. China can criticize USA, but they will lose money.

[mieses]

China's economic tactic is to convert their manipulated currency into dollars. China is desperate for dollars. No one trades in or trusts RMB.

[magicsmoke]

Except when they need to buy anything from China. Or are all those factories an illusion as well?

[throwaway1997]

I buy from China as part of my job and we usually either buy in Hong Kong dollars, US dollars or RMB and dump the RMB as soon as possible. One of the reasons that HK exists in its current form is to allow us to easily dump RMB.

[xenihn]

Isn't that conducted in dollars?

[i_am_nomad]

Just as a heads up, this statement is often used as an anti-Semitic canard. You obviously didn’t mean it in that context, but you may want to use that quotation with caution.

[cannadhopefu]

Can you explain a little context behind this? I am not Jewish so I am just purely curious as to why it would be anti-Semitic.

[SpicyLemonZest]

There's some disagreement over who originally made up the quote, but it may have been a neo-Nazi named Kevin Strom.

[xlc0212]

You are free to do anything you want. You just have be responsible for the result. It is just how everything works.

[smt88]

This can only become partly true if you're using a definition of "free" that's so broad, it becomes meaningless. Even then, we all live in societies that preclude us from choosing to do certain things. In the US, I can't buy anything from North Korea, for example.

[mieses]

The quote is a truism but what is the source? Google brings up a very limited, maybe filtered, list of results. Orwell, Voltaire, a white supremacist? I don't really care which. Just curious about the historical origin.