3 ms·

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, g

by nrr 25d 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 25d 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?
- nrr 25d ago
  > 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. I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on. This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital. My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest. > And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly? I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two. > Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have? I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here. Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2]. From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation. Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily. -- 0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014. 1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012. 2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.

by nrr 25d ago

WalterBright 25d 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?

nrr 25d ago
> 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. I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on. This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital. My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest. > And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly? I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two. > Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have? I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here. Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2]. From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation. Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily. -- 0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014. 1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012. 2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.