> 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.
The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
Germany did not self-destruct. It was destroyed by the Allied powers.
Whatever growth US had in the 19 century, Europe self-destructing through WWI and WWII ensured US will be the lead in the 20th.
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.
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.
You are right about looting resources. But economy is orthogonal to ideology, eg Australia is a property-minded free-trading polity but has a contracting economy as most of its exports are resource-based rather than manufactured goods or services. Nobody is preventing Australians from being a high-tech powerhouse, businesses have just chosen to focus on extractive and agrarian sources of revenue.
>Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America
Yes, I already mentioned that: 'far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal institutions.' You haven't addressed the geographic, population, or civilizational arguments in any way, so merely repeating your initial assertion isn't very persuasive.
Feel free to try harder.
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.
> the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close.
Please give an example.
What?? Can you explain this better? The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is? The USSR was more developed than the US?
Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically? See other comments about USSR buying wheat from the US. See the 21 million people Stalin had to murder to try and keep the system running. See Venezuela, drowning in the riches of it's oil, having massive inflation and people starving while their overweight leader ate a pile of empanadas on TV in front of them all. None of these arguments people are making about US resources or distance from other countries or whatever else make any sense.
Yes, generally, but it's not linear and 1-1. The USSR was not more developed than the US, it doesn't work like that, but the trend is: the more developed a nation is, the more centrally controlled the economy will be. Why? Because as nations develop, the government has BOTH the capital and motivation to more tightly control the economy.
Underdeveloped countries simply don't have the capital to enforce economic planning. They might have laws on the books, but it doesn't matter, they can't enforce them. The US has laws on the books, and the capital to back it up. On a macro level, the US government is very closely monitoring and steering the economy. Of course through control of the currency, the Fed, taxes, regulation, subsidies, tariffs, contracts, and more. Consider what makes up our GDP - healthcare alone is 20% ish. How is that controlled? Through our regulations and structure established and maintained by the US government.
The central control has to develop, alongside everything else. Somalia isn't centrally controlled because it can't be, because it's not developed, and doesn't have a way to be centrally controlled. If it was, it would be. See: the history of any developed country.
> Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically?
In the 1940s-1980s (USSR), and in the 2010s-present (China) and if the US's overreaction is to be believed, from 1960-present (Cuba).
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.
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.
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.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
Walter did this by taking the frankly idiotic position that Standard Oil actually wasn’t a monopoly, and you took the less-idiotic-but-still-bad position that Microsoft’s terrible business was actually just a consequence of government.
It wasn't some vague "copyright" thing that made Microsoft do the AARD code, or make it difficult/impossible to install Netscape on Windows.
Microsoft even sued a guy named Mike Rowe for selling software (mikerowesoft.com). That's insane.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-...
Note that the article only measures violations of child labor laws, i.e. there are (presumably many times more) children working without violating the laws. Why are people deliberately employing lousy workers? Why are business owners lobbying to allow these lousy workers to work more hours?
I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.
> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy.
> This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
Economics isn't a game of make believe for me.
I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world.
In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling.
> Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand.
I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours.
My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease.
> (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
"All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data?
> The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market.
I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.
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.
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?
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.
The US created that economy and created the capital. Colonial America had much of nothing.
> Taiwan
I asked Google "is taiwan a free market country?"
yielding:
"Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
Huh, did they not? After the Seven Years' War, the Currency Act of 1764 received assent, and it functionally required that public debts be paid in hard money. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, this was a little hard to come by in the colonies.
> Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
> I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I read it many years ago. Sorry, I don't have a reference. I regret not having a photographic memory.
I dunno, man. Caesar asks for his money, and I just give it to him. I don't really have much of a say.
> I regret not having a photographic memory.
That's fine. I don't have a photographic memory either; I just have a few boxes of 3x5 notecards and accompanying topic/source indices in a notebook.
You said, essentially, "sure the US had freedom, but maybe the amount of land and resources it had is the real reason it has done so well."
Walter countered with, "Taiwan is a tiny island with very little resources, but it is economically prosperous, so maybe land and resources aren't a big factor. It also happens to have a free market economy."
You replied with what sounded like an attempt at saying that Taiwan wasn't actually a free market.
Walter said, "I don't know man, I just did a quick search to make sure Taiwan wasn't communist or anything before adding it as some data to your analysis."
Does that clear things up? We're just trying to help you out here. We've already made up our minds but it sounds like you're still wondering so maybe we can help?
It isn't especially interesting to me to try devise frameworks for coercing Caesar to do one thing over another; Caesar's just going to do what Caesar's going to do. The most that I can do is hedge against needing to migrate again because this Caesar has decided, e.g., that staunch pacifism is treasonous.
I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas. If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't. If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them, not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
Acknowledged. That nevertheless tends to be where my interest in it lies. Near as I can tell, I don't actually have much of an ideology; I wasn't raised to be political in the typical Anglo-American sense.
> I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar
This gets a little in the weeds about my conceptualization of the state, but here's the view from 10km high:
Caesar is a model of an institution that arises when coordination problems exceed the capacity of voluntary associations. He's an emergent response to complexity, and I tend to ask questions of him that are flavored more like, "What coordination problem requires coercion, if any, and how much coercion is actually necessary?"
(As it turns out, the answer looks something like "enough to prevent folks from killing each other." My Mennonite upbringing makes me inclined to add in "and perhaps enough to keep the trust of the congregation," but I'll admit that's probably less relevant for secular folks.)
> but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas.
Why is property yours in the first place? Property is a socially enforced exclusion, and a construction of a society out of that major tenet of noncoercion and enforcement of property rights is by some measure impossible.
> If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't.
This is definitionally impossible with Caesar.
> If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them
I feel like this ignores collective action. Persuading enough individuals to contribute voluntarily is itself a coordination mechanism, and it isn't obvious to me how it could produce the same equilibrium as collective provision.
If the benefit is broadly non-excludable, there's a familiar free rider problem, and at some point, "please persuade everyone gently and individually" isn't really a solution to the coordination problem. It instead kinda handwaves it away.
> not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
Caesar isn't necessarily someone who happens to have more guns (though, typically, he tends to be). It's more important to consider that he's the head of an institution that is embedded in laws, norms, mores, folkways, consensus, trial of facts, bureaucracies, and behavioral expectations of individuals.
Moreover, coercion isn't even the defining feature of Caesar. It's just the backstop in his toolbox for solving coordination problems.