> take the largest dictatorship in the world: China
China has semi-effective capital controls, at least on the hoi polloi. (There is massive leakage via Hong Kong and Macau, but that's for the hoi olligoi.) China also has a thriving cash culture, which undermines your tracking motivation argument.
Look at authoritarian countries broadly, however, and you find a mix of strict capital-control regimes to maybe something on paper but zero enforcement [1]. To the extent they have capital controls, it's generally to defend the value of the currency. Not for surveillance. Conversely, thriving democracies have enforced capital controls (again to defend their currency).
Capital controls are not an authoritarian-only policy tool. And the principal motivation for capital controls, i.e. requiring the use of domestic currency, across history, has been economic.
> CCP does not take "what they can". The tax burden is much lower than basically in any liberal democracy in the West
Straw man--nobody claimed the CCP or anyone else takes "what they can." Your metapoint is correct: China is the 34th lowest (7.7%) and the U.S. 184th (12.2%) [2]. But that number doesn't include what the elites extract [3].
China has semi-effective capital controls, at least on the hoi polloi. (There is massive leakage via Hong Kong and Macau, but that's for the hoi olligoi.) China also has a thriving cash culture, which undermines your tracking motivation argument.
Look at authoritarian countries broadly, however, and you find a mix of strict capital-control regimes to maybe something on paper but zero enforcement [1]. To the extent they have capital controls, it's generally to defend the value of the currency. Not for surveillance. Conversely, thriving democracies have enforced capital controls (again to defend their currency).
Capital controls are not an authoritarian-only policy tool. And the principal motivation for capital controls, i.e. requiring the use of domestic currency, across history, has been economic.
> CCP does not take "what they can". The tax burden is much lower than basically in any liberal democracy in the West
Straw man--nobody claimed the CCP or anyone else takes "what they can." Your metapoint is correct: China is the 34th lowest (7.7%) and the U.S. 184th (12.2%) [2]. But that number doesn't include what the elites extract [3].
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-coun...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
[3] https://www.icij.org/investigations/offshore/leaked-records-...