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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. All the big economic success was due to state coordination and intervention, not (neo-)liberalism. Liberalism might work for a smaller country that becomes a trading hub (like Singapore), and uses low taxes as a sort of parasitic strategy; that's why it cannot be replicated by large countries.

I am glad that Germany is coming to their senses and finally rejecting neoliberalism. Now if only Eurozone leadership (which was created during neoliberal heydays) would do the same across the EU.

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Eurozone leadership will never do that, because of national egoisms. Just look at how Airbus builds its airplanes, because everybody wants a slice, so they fly each airplane body halfway across the continent and back... And Airbus is just 4 nations (FR, DE, ES, UK). Collaboration across all of the Eurozone or all of the EU would be a mess of ITER-like proportions.

Even with privatisation in the 90s and many on the left disputing this, Germany is still considered a social market economy ("Soziale Marktwirtschaft").

If one was designing a European aircraft manufacturer from the ground up one would not choose the Airbus model… but that’s not what happened. They were all going to require state subsidy, presumably the total subsidy is less than if each state were subsidising their own aircraft manufacturer to compete with each other. And if they had settled on one location and the other sites had shut down you and I well know the governments would just be subsidising jobs in some other industry.

“National egoisms” is a nebulous phrase. The fact is that they would have been punished by their political systems. The governments handed out the subsidies that were necessary to not be punished. That’s democracy.

Singapore’s economy is also significantly planned, despite the opposite being the common knowledge.

Same with South Korea.

Also Singapore has 17% corporate tax, compared with 12.5% in Ireland.

I was kind of shocked to find this out too. For instance:

"As of 2020, 78.7% of Singapore residents live in public housing, down from a high of 88.0% in 2000."

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

Yeah, that only strengthens my argument that neoliberalism has failed.

First, what is your definition of neoliberalism?

Second, why do you think a country like Germany (where the ratio of government expenditure to GDP is around 50%) can be classified as “neoliberal” in the sense you mean it?

Maybe because they replaced lots of social security features by private company insurances.

Health care and pensions cover hardly all your needs and need to be supplemented by private insurances.

They privatised or try to privatise essential services like postal services, telecommunications and railroads.

They got rid of government experts in favor of external private company "experts". In combination with construction contracts being put out to tender this leads to failures like the BER airport. All these private companies weren't able to built and airport that complies with the building regulations. So they either aren't as effective as neoliberlism claims or they exploited the lack of governmental oversight to get more money.

Not to mention the millions politicians like Ursula vin der Leyen gave to companies like McKinsey to advise on the modernisations of the Armed Forces which lead to the opposite.

They are neoliberal, it's just isn't so easy to sell it to the people as something positive. That's why the SPD was needed to implement a wage raise killer like Hartz IV, because people thought of the SPD as a social party working for the workers.

Neoliberalism: Free trade and globalization is good, state ownership and state economic investment bad.

Germany was certainly less damaged by neoliberalism (which is an ideology, actual practice might be different) than the US and UK, who were the major proponents of neoliberalism. I think the reason was that Germany has tripartism, which makes union-industry negotiations less antagonistic.

But, the Eurozone was built according to neoliberal principles (and associated austerity policies), and the results were catastrophic for the EU. That's why we (I am Czech) need to snap out of it.

Ha-Joon Chang and George Stiglitz describe the problems of neoliberalism as a strategy of economic development in their books.

It's a perfect example of neoliberalism.

The automotive industry made the mistake of cancelling their orders during Corona and were then surprised to find that the capacities were allocated elsewhere when they wanted to order again.

So they whined at the government to subsidise the fab.

What about the AstraZeneca sending "best effort" vacc doses to the UK with ~100% but "best effort" the EU got ~30% of what it ordered? (sure I guess the EU will not again sign contracts that contain "best effort").

Not to mention that the AstraZeneca vaccine was developed by the Oxford university and they planned to release it with costs until the Gates foundation convinced them to sell it.

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