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Comment by RandomLensman | Hacker News Reader

I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might even do the opposite).

Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction of lots of several codes into one, for example).

There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.

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The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).

Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for example.

Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the "state", so not sure war does generally shrink administrative systems.

If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal system.

As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to shrink an administrative system that just won a war.

Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.

Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848.

They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure.

Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.

Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.

They were post-WW2. The German Miracle in particular came about when Germany went full free market as a way to recover from the economy being burned to the ground. This boom lasted until 1970 when the socialists were voted into power, and on came the taxes and hamstringing. The Japanese economy immediately after WW2 was run by American leftist academics, who refused to allow big business to operate. The economy flatlined. Until that was rescinded, and the Japanese free market economic boom began and ran up into the 80s.

That sounds very much like a conveniently right-wing potted history. I'd be willing to bet the truth is rather more subtle*. Either way, they were both examples of economies that only got off the ground because of massive government spending.

(*) a quick read of a wikipedia article about the Japanese economic miracle - which undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda - certainly confirms this. At best relaxing anti-monopoly laws was an example of legislation reform that helped further boost the already impressive recovery that had occurred during the 50s.

Um, where did Germany get "massive government spending"? If you say "the Marshall Plan", look up the MP on wikipedia. Germany did get MP money, but far less than Britain and France did. The latter two did not have a "British Miracle" or "French Miracle".

I didn't claim the spending was the prime cause of any "miracle", but it's fairly certain it wouldn't have happened without it. France and the UK did have impressive recoveries too, that would have been impossible without the MP etc.

FWIW I would actually expect the fact that because the priority at the time was economic recovery before everything else, red tape wasn't allowed to get in the way to the degree it often seems to once prosperity had been restored. I'd even say that's probably a reasonable trade off, though it certainly doesn't justify governments letting growing businesses get away with whatever they feel like. Nobody likes bureaucracy or red tape, but almost always it's what we end up with as a result of repeated cases of corporate behaviour that's widely agreed to be unacceptable.

> undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda

Leftists always mis-attribute the causes of prosperity. The wikipedia article cites causes that are commonplace in other countries that had no miracle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle

Leftist economies have never experienced an economic miracle in any country.

East Germany, for example (compared with West Germany).

Nobody here is arguing a fully socialist command-and-control economy is a better choice.

But you haven't made any sort of case that the German or Japanese "miracles" were largely due to raw unrestrained capitalism. There are way too many factors that made those particular countries special cases at the time to pinpoint all the primary causes, let alone tease out various secondary factors some of which probably tempered rather than accelerated growth.

German ordoliberalism and the social market economy are certainly not full free market, i.e., Germany never went full free market after WW2 and there also would have been no political support for such a move (from the left or right). The boom then ended in the 2nd half of the 1960s.

A country does not have to be "full" free market to enjoy the benefits of the free market. The more free market it is, the better the results. It's one of the beauties of the free market.

German industry was very interconnected with limited domestic competition in those days - a free market it was not by a long shot.

Edit: It's fine to make broad claims about free market and growth, but please provide some citations to back up sweeping statements (and also to allow to go deeper into definitions).

Do I really need citations for free market growth? Every country that tries it gets good results - the more free market, the better.

Communist economies always wind up facing famine.

Communist China, for example, switched from a communist economy to a free market one. Look at the results. Korea split in two, one communist, one free market. Which one prospered? East vs West Germany, same story.

The US tried central economic planning for gasoline in the 1970's (repealed by Reagan as his first EO). Disaster. The US tried central economic planning for airline routes, fares, and schedules up until Reagan ended that. The result was a huge increase in efficiency and low fares.

Of course you do! Statements like "The more free market it is, the better the results" are not just about things at the ends of the spectrum, so that needs proper backing not handwaving about communist vs. capitalist economies. For example, is Norway more free market than Iceland? What are the criteria?

The point is that any such bureaucracy is recently formed and not a legacy of pre-1945 statutes.

Perhaps but war was posited of a method of "clearing the books" and allowing significant reform. If that were true you'd expect such societies to be less weighed down by bureaucracy than others that had no such opportunity.

Clearing of books has no bearing whatsover on subsequent re-writing of them.

However if the present legislative burden is excessively oppressive, a war, revolution, or reconstitution might address same.

Your argument is a non sequitur.

Germany and Japan have had reputations as being somewhat bureaucractic for decades though, which says to me war had no lasting impact, if any at all. I.e. a very expensive way to achieve nothing.

Notionally the "wars" on drugs and terror are more akin to the Islamic principle of jihad, in the sense of a struggle, rather than of military domination, occupation, and conquest.

In the case of World War II, numerous governments were created from whole cloth following the war, amongst conquored territories, in newly-created states, and even amongst some of the winners.

Notably, Japan had a constitution imposed on it by the United States, which largely exists to the present day. Some traditional institutions were preserved (e.g., the emperor), but in almost entirely symbolic form. Germany likewise was reconstituted under a new government, as was Italy. Even France saw a new government formed (the Fifth Republic) in 1958. The states of the Eastern bloc were reconstituted under Communist rule as Soviet satellites. India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and several Arabic states received independence. The state of Israel was formed. Much of Africa decolonised in the 1950s and 1960s.

There was of course some continuity through all of this, but in large part, new governments emerged and old laws were often voided.

But through all of that the German civil code after WW2 still looked quite similar to the one pre-WW1, e.g, rules on how people transact or private property had huge continuity.

Isn't the question not that laws etc. change but if there is true reduction of the total?

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