Quote:
Originally Posted by Gozer
And I was suggesting that right-weaving-left was much more powerful than left-all-the-way.
Hardly the opposite of my original point: the USA is the truest experiment of limited self-government in my lifetime and has been the preeminent world power in my lifetime.
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I guess that only works if you consider the U.S. and the USSR to be comparable, and if you measure success only by which one became a world power. I would suggest you do neither. The USSR was a socialist dictatorship that failed for a variety of reasons, and among them was the failure to modernize industry as quickly as the U.S., and their unnecessarily belligerent stance toward the West, which ended up costing them tons and tons of resources that they didn't have. Not really comparable to the U.S. which became dominant in the world because government spending on both the war and entitlement programs precipitated a huge economic recovery at the exact same time that the infrastructure of their main competitors had been decimated by World War II.
I'd also suggest that the U.S. system has historically been pretty far from laissez-faire. Don't fall for the Reaganomics hype; government spending
increased substantially during the Reagan years. The U.S. likes to pretend to hew to this ideology of small government, but what that turns out to mean is paying lip service to limiting entitlement programs that are already impoverished while sending spending through the roof on regulatory agencies and corporate welfare. As a result, the U.S. has an unthinkably huge, unwieldy and expensive government that provides very little value to its citizens for their tax dollar.
In fact, according to the laissez-faire Heritage Foundation, the most laissez-faire country in the world today is Hong Kong, followed by Singapore. Not really world powers, or shining bastions of the rising tide lifting all boats.
Again--believe what you want on moral/ethical grounds--but historically, the evidence just isn't there to support your contention that laissez-faire economies are stronger.