Re: Countries that followed the Austrian School to Prosperity
Whoa (mis)information overload! Calm down buddy.
You're the only one using exclamation marks and words like "woah."
Apparently the 'carpet bombing' technique was more popular on this forum than I originally thought. Nice list, but let's try to focus more on a single success story, not a laundry list of things deemed successes.
You can call it "carpet bombing" if you want. I call it "presenting lots of examples of market success stories."
I don't want to even start with the list because: the burden of proof isn't on me to disprove a claim (or else I'd spend the rest of my life writing a rebuttal to this post as you've listed so many countries)
I don't think anything will be "proven" one way or another. I just wanted to showcase a considerable number of reasonable examples of market-based territories compared to territories which pursued policies which can be deemed more statist. My apologies if I have "carpet bombed" you with too many.
If we want to say that the 'opposite' of a 'free market' is the obvious failure of the system of true communism then we are in agreement; but that isn't the dichotomy here. It's not a choice between total laissez faire 'free markets' and total state controlled top-down Soviet style communism.
I never said anything about "total laissez faire vs total state control." In all my examples, they were merely "more market based" vs. "less market based." I think they offer compelling evidence that markets tend towards prosperity, while statist regimes tend toward poverty. Do you disagree?
I'm talking specifically about Austrian economic policy, views, beliefs or suggestions and how that was used as a framework for building a nation out of the primitive state of man: poverty. Observing a system that has an element of market dynamics isn't a Austrian phenomenon, the market doesn't belong to the Austrian school.
Austrian economic policy consists of the following tenant: "there should not be an economic policy." The Austrian school, more than any other, advocates freedom, which means laissez faire markets. Ironically, you say that "the market doesn't belong to the Austrian school"... and this is very humorous because the Austrian school is the only one which suggests that the market ought not belong to anyone at all.
Maybe you should do US history, specifically how Austrian style "Free Market" views were critical in creating prosperity, just flesh out 1776 to 1920 and why you think that "when it was actually a generally capitalist, free-market nation and grew from mere peasantry to the world super power in 150 years". Why 1776? The US economic situation was in horrible disarray during and shortly thereafter the Revolutionary War; in addition there were multiple other economic and social calamities in this time frame. You don't even mention the Civil War.
What does war have to do with free markets? Are you suggesting that the misery, death, and destruction wrought by the Civil War is a result of free people trading goods and services with each other?
And in the end you still haven't presented a narrative or story regarding 1 specific country to which followed these policies to climb out of poverty.
I consider it a 'carpet bombing' technique when one dumps dozens of brief blurbs to which each represents an entire argument. Rather than getting into specifics where the realm of the Free Marketeer crumbles into a pile of useless jargon and contradictions the tactic is always to try and prove many (or in your case, dozens) of points with a single, short, nondescript post. Problem is that this only alludes to information to which you assume we all agree on or already all know. I'm not asking you to preach to your choir, I'm asking for a specific historical example with at least a modicum of detail. You provided none.
Am I being unreasonable in requesting such a thing? Seems like at least one person here would be familiar enough with something to provide at least a paragraph on the topic.