Comment by littlestymaar
4 days ago
Classical liberals are akin to communists in that when the practical application of their ideas fail, it's obviously because it was only a corrupted version that ended up being really put in practice. “It wasn't really Communism” and “It wasn't deregulated enough”.
No, no, not at all.
Communists can say "oh, it wasn't real communism." Classical liberalism and neoliberalism can make much stronger claims: a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.
I say stochastically, because in the real world there's a lot of noise from other factors, of course.
And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.
> a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.
Except in practice it always fail to materialize, neoliberalism has repeatedly been tried everywhere in the western world, resulting in decline instead of prosperity. And people blame the fact that not enough regulations were removed to justify why it failed. So exactly like Communists.
The reality is that the real world is too complex for simplistic ideologies to have positive effects. No matter what kind of ideology.
> And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.
As if the only difference was regulations, and not the fact that Canada was at that point part of the British Empire
It's like the commies in the 30s saying that Communism was indeed better, as the USSR had by far the highest growth among industrial nations by then. Forgetting that this growth was mostly due to the fact that Tsarist Russia was lagging far behind before that, and that catching up is always going to cause higher growth.
> Except in practice it always fail to materialize, neoliberalism has repeatedly been tried everywhere in the western world, resulting in decline instead of prosperity.
Are we living in the same world?
All over the place, we see that more neoliberal places are richer than less neoliberal places. For example, Ireland is richer than Germany which is richer than Greece.
> As if the only difference was regulations, and not the fact that Canada was at that point part of the British Empire
You are right that there were more differences between them. Other people have done more extensive work on this, and I'm not doing it justice. The US had and has really asinine and heavy-handed financial regulation.
Their bans on branch banking are really something, too.
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