Comment by eru
3 days ago
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.
Singapore and Lichtenstein are probably the richest by PPP and they are what I would describe as benevolent monarchies (at least under LKY it was) that have managed to implement classic liberal market policies precisely because they have suppressed some or many components of neoliberalist representative democracy.
LKY basically in a nutshell said 'you get the free market * because I fucking said so and I am smarter than all of you'. Weirdly Singaporeans were smart enough to realize LKY was a one in a million years kind of leader that actually both actually was smarter than everyone else AND was not corrupted to the point he poisoned the whole attempt. If he'd have sought out the populace to vote on his policies they would have done the same thing as most other places in asia and slowly vote more things to themselves in the name of welfare until their position as one of the freest financial markets in Asia was no longer the case.
* Well not for houses, but like half of Singapore is immigrants that can be taxed to pay for the other half's houses so it works out for them.
1 reply →
> Are we living in the same world?
I live in the western world. In a continent that gave ordoliberal (the German branch of the Mont Pellerin society) principles a quasi-constitutional values. And that continent has fallen behind both the government-debt pumped US and the state-driven China, down from a dominant position when the said principles were raised as supreme laws.
In fact, the very country that invented railways has now been unable to operate first-world level of rail service for three decades, with the collapse happening because of Thatcher's policies.
> 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.
Ireland is a tax haven. And half of its GDP is entirely virtual. And again China and the US (which has roughly three time as much public debts as the EU and has had much more relax monetary policies than what the EU can legally due to the Treaty of Rome and its updates) fare better than the EU. But then again I'm sure you'll say that “it's not actual liberalism”…
> The US had and has really asinine and heavy-handed financial regulation.
The regulations put in place in the 30s after the great depression were relaxed by Reagan, and unsurprisingly it lead to the reemergence if financial crisis after half a century of financial stability.
4 replies →