Thought I’d share some thoughts. I don’t share them to push a point of view, an economic theory or to change your mind about something. It’s just experience from my past.

The early 1990s I worked in a general trading company. We dealt in computer parts, watches, electronics and pretty much anything a customer from Middle East, Pakistan, India and Europe wanted from the factories in China. Batteries, pencils, scissors etc....as long as it was as cheap as humanly possible. I spent a lot of time in factories in S. China and met with hundreds of factory bosses, factory workers and the “businessmen” who came to HK to make the deals. We were a small scale typical HK low end company/exporter and I was at the low end of the company so I mostly interacted with the other grass roots guys in the other companies. Warehouse guys, moody paper shuffling clerks, factory floor workers, truck drivers etc.

I was often in the container port warehouse packing containers for the shipments. On one day after filling a 20ft container with hundreds of boxes of “stick on clocks” and cheap digital watches I was tired and standing in the area where the warehouse stored all the goods. Piled high to the ceiling on all sides were thousands of boxes and boxes destined for the world. Suddenly I had a complete moment of something like when you smoke way too much herb and get the fear. WTF am I doing? WTF is this?WTF are we all doing? All this cheap crap being shipped to countries where it is really just useless and will likely be pollution in a landfill within weeks or months, the kids and families proud to be able to participate in the consumption, but it was just garbage. The factory owners with their young secret second wives in the province, the businessmen on the “trip” also enjoying the massive prostitute industry that is/was/seemed to be a main motivation for their trip, the seedy hotels, the pollution in the air, rivers and towns of the factories and the millions of tired, naive, young rural workers with glazed eyes performing some banal task for hours and hours, days and days, years and years. These guys doing the deals were the entrepreneurs, the buyers and the sellers, sure they created profit but so many of them were not what I considered decent humans. Bad moral perverts, greedy characters really cheating style negotiators on both sides. So many connected to government, police and corrupt organisations from around the world. (BTW the same kind of people that also came around in crypto in that area trying to copy bitcoin with all their exchange scams and shitcoin scams, if you look at the history you will see a very strong connection of those guys with coming to HK/China.) The factory workers, the office workers…we all had a job but it was just a dead end to afford our daily life while the big boys drunkenly cheated on their wife every night, enjoyed and then sold all their crap to factory workers and office workers in the rest of the world. Corruption and Cheating. Dirty police and government. Day after day, millions of tonnes of absolute crap products vomited around the world. For what?

I stayed in that company for a few more years but as HK’s role as the middleman died and my boss moved abroad before the handover, it was over and I moved on to other clown jobs.

Is that free market capitalism, the noble entrepreneur? I saw that it doesn’t matter their nationality or where they were from in the world, it just a lot of the time was a kind of dark seedy business when you can see really what was happening every day.

I think that the motivation for profit and business is a beneficial way. I always supported that. People learn good skills and be proud of producing quality tools and products. Mass consumption because of cheap garbage products and mass consumption of cheap garbage social media is a problem.