Before anyone gets hysterical about China buying up “our” industries, have a look at this nice piece from the Christian Science Monitor. (Not that anyone should be hysterical if the numbers were reversed!)
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/3770/chinese-investment-in-the-us-chickenfeed/
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Can’t an argument be made that the CNOOC bid is in effect nationalizing a private business and should be prevented from that point of view?
TDL, that’s precisely my argument against this deal. If the Department of Commerce were buying UCL, everyone would be up in arms, and rightly so. A foreign government (CNOOC is owned by the Chinese government, for those that don’t know) doing it doesn’t make it OK.
The counter-argument would be: but what if the UCL shareholders agree to it? My argument would be: we don’t allow people to sell themselves into slavery. This is ethically the same thing.
Slavery, bah. The shareholders own, as in private property, the capital goods of the company. They have a voluntary contract with the employees. If CNOOC buys the company, they will own the capital goods and have a voluntary contract with the employees.
To say that CNOOC would be nationalizing the business is misleading. The coercion occurs when the Chinese people are taxed the money to pay for it. To take the nationalization objection to a logical extreme, the Chinese government nationalizes stationary when it buys paper from OfficeDepot. We must stop them before there is an unbridgable Stationary Gap!
It’s fine to suggest that the shareholders should choose not to sell to CNOOC because they are an evil Chinese government-owned company, because their chairman wears real fur, eats red meat… whatever. But when you say we should prevent the sale from occurring, you propose an additional coercion. The shareholders would no longer be free to sell their property. Instead that decision would be in the hands of federal regulators. Now who’s nationalizing?
Contract with employees – (seems to me) In Washington State the owner of “Bar-S” packing comp broke a union contract by “selling” the company to a holding company.
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