People move to places with economic opportunity. That _tends_ to be places with free speech, but look at how many people move to places like Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
The total number of job opportunities in two countries over the span of the ~50 years they have been major oil producers is necessarily less than the number of opportunities available in an entire continent + one of the largest nations in the world over a period of centuries.
Almost 90% of the UAE’s population consists of migrant workers. The U.S. can’t get anywhere near that. Since people flock to countries with free speech, then the UAE must have extremely free speech laws. QED.
Of course this is as wrong as your original claim because seeing where people migrate is not a reliable indicator of whether their destination has “free speech” or not.
> You have a choice with that. Corporations cannot stop you from publishing your own blog.
Indeed, in America both myself and Rupert Murdoch are free to start a news media operation. I’m sure the journalistic merits of our respective works (and not how much capital and media connections we each have available to us) will determine our success in the free marketplace of ideas.
Of course state-run media will tend to publish propaganda in support of the government, but media is not a binary choice between Pravda and Fox News/MSNBC. It is naive to think that the current media landscape consists of each individual rationally selecting articles from all available blogs and news sites - we get most of our news from the places that have money to publish/research/advertise their stories, which is almost always (in the U.S.) done by private corporations.
Many articles about current events found on news aggregators such as HN tend to be by these sources not because of some hidden conspiracy but because these are the stories with the most visibility.
People complain of shadow bans, the amorphous algorithm pushing links away from the front page, comments getting eaten, and all sorts of supposed control on Hacker News every day.
How much advancement was because of a corporation? Versus some engineer/scientist that just got a 5% bonus that year, while the discovery netted billons.
The factories that lifted billions out of poverty weren't created by the scientist that got a 5% bonus. They were created by corporations. Things could be better. They're better than ever before though.
Money is inanimate, it can't actually do anything by itself. It takes labour and resources to realize an idea, and money is one way to control how labour and resources should be directed. This is why money (capital) equates to power.
As a result, under capitalism, those with more capital have more power to generate more capital, leading to a feedback loop that concentrates capital.
They are ruled by an avowedly Marxist (state-capitalist) government, who have lifted hundreds of millions from abject poverty, in the largest economic miracle of our lifetimes.
I'm not saying it was pristine. But you make an extremely poor case against Marx, or the negative effects of US imperialism on the global poor.
Practically all of Chinas economic growth was after and due to economic liberalization that welcomed corporations into the country. China is easily the best example of how much more economically effective markets and property rights are than central planning and state owned everything. Their dumbass government literally starved tens of millions of people because of their ill advised central planning attempt
