On freedom again

Yesterday my Chinese flat-mate experienced how freedom, the freedom we believe in, in all its multiple forms, could lead to very nasty consequences. She had ordered a laptop on the internet because here in the States they are very cheap compared to China. She was very happy she had done a real bargain when she realized that the thing in question had been shipped straight away from China. She turned furious.

And we had a very free speech on how unfair all that is going on in her country is.
The problem is that China is a communist country. And what happens in China is that the big American companies go there and hire people who work night and day for a very little wage that is just enough to live. Then they sell some of the products they produce to a very low price in the States because there people don’t want to buy laptops when they are too expensive. But the biggest amount of the products are sold in China itself, the biggest market in the world, for a very high price. And both the American and Chinese government agree on that.

I was a little bit shocked, first because I thought they did not like each others so they could not agree on anything. Secondly because I was not familiar with this meaning of the word communist because it means something else in Italy. In Italy it means ‘anyone who opposes Berlusconi’.

I suggested that she should express her dissent and call CNN or Fox news to tell them to say such kind of things on the news. She did it but they answered that they were free to say whatever they wanted because they were private channels. Because of the freedom of the media companies. And no journalist would take her case into serious account being afraid to get fired. So she called the Chinese TV and asked them to talk about it. But they did not want to because in China people are not allowed free speech. I told her that this was free market, the kind of market that guarantees all kind of freedoms, including the freedom of Chinese people not to accept such an exploiting job and starve because ‘We’ll find someone else who is so desperate to do it anyway’.