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> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. An

> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.

paulryanrogers 1mo ago
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- krupan 1mo ago
  The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so. Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
  - pocksuppet 1mo ago
    Did the US stand with the USSR?
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  > Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
  - throwway120385 1mo ago
    No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
      - tombert 1mo ago
        > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
        tombert 1mo ago
        No, I was making fun of the fact that you haven't seen something and you act like this is compelling evidence of anything.
anigbrowl 1mo ago
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
  - anigbrowl 1mo ago
    They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths. They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions. Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      > Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology. Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets? Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity. In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class. Ideology was totally the dominant force.
      - anigbrowl 1mo ago
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
tombert 1mo ago
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable. Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism. [1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
  - tombert 1mo ago
    "Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example. You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States. I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving. There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union". It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR. > pick one The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one. P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
preg_match 1mo ago
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically. And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped. You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century. > the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. Please give an example.
  - stopping 1mo ago
    Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-human-freedom-index-switzerland-is-the-most-libertarian-oriented-nation/ https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      Note I wrote "has been". The economic freedom in the US has steadily declined over the years.
      - stopping 1mo ago
        You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.
nrr 1mo ago
Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0]. It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual. 1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian; 2. The US became rich; 3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism. It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way. I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty. -- 0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument. 1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI. 2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  > It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries. And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
throwway120385 1mo ago
I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  I wrote "has been". Everybody seems to have missed that.

> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.

paulryanrogers 1mo ago

Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
krupan 1mo ago
The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so. Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
- pocksuppet 1mo ago
  Did the US stand with the USSR?
WalterBright 1mo ago
> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
- throwway120385 1mo ago
  No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
    - tombert 1mo ago
      > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
        tombert 1mo ago
        No, I was making fun of the fact that you haven't seen something and you act like this is compelling evidence of anything.

anigbrowl 1mo ago

The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.

WalterBright 1mo ago
Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
- anigbrowl 1mo ago
  They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths. They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions. Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    > Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology. Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets? Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity. In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class. Ideology was totally the dominant force.
    - anigbrowl 1mo ago

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

tombert 1mo ago

That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable. Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism. [1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.

WalterBright 1mo ago
Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
- tombert 1mo ago
  "Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example. You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States. I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving. There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union". It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR. > pick one The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one. P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.

preg_match 1mo ago

The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically. And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped. You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.

WalterBright 1mo ago
When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century. > the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. Please give an example.
- stopping 1mo ago
  Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-human-freedom-index-switzerland-is-the-most-libertarian-oriented-nation/ https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Note I wrote "has been". The economic freedom in the US has steadily declined over the years.
    - stopping 1mo ago
      You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.

nrr 1mo ago

Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0]. It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual. 1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian; 2. The US became rich; 3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism. It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way. I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty. -- 0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument. 1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI. 2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.

WalterBright 1mo ago
> It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries. And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?

throwway120385 1mo ago

I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.

WalterBright 1mo ago
I wrote "has been". Everybody seems to have missed that.