China quite literally and unambiguously stole trillions of dollars in IP, trade secrets, and data from research labs in the West by explicitly and systematically embedding spies, hacking, and blackmailing/threatening employees/students wherever economically beneficial information existed for nearly 20 years. And this is on top of the practice of CCP sanctioned theft from and screwing over of nearly every company that outsourced manufacturing there from 1990 onward. The fact that they finally have enough domestic knowledge to actually innovate as a result of that isn’t some testament to what you think it is.

If someone spends a billion dollars researching some new technology and you have someone exfiltrate the blueprints, improve on it slightly, and then undercut who you stole from in the market because you had no investment to recoup… you’re not some enlightened morally righteous free thinker. You’re just a parasite.

US did the same in the 19th century with Europe and it's part of how the country bootstrapped it's industrial revolution.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/07/30/ip_thef...

> You’re just a parasite.

No. It's parasitic to horde human knowledge and seek rent for it.

If one is obsessed with the idea of maximizing profit above all other considerations including one's brotherhood to man, there's still other ways to do it that don't involve hoarding knowledge.

You are morally righteous to liberate human knowledge, it just annoys rent seekers. Honestly, annoying rent seekers should just be an immediate marker that whatever you're doing is probably ethical.