One of the hardest points in arguing for libertarianism is that there is not enough evidence that libertarian states outperform welfare states and mixed economies. Of course there is America which is richer than Europe, and there is Hong-Kong and south Korea, but there are also Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, all those countries have huge public spending but they also have a very high standard of living. If libertarianism is so radically better, then how can these anomalies exist?
Germany is much more socialistic than Britain but it provides comparable and even higher standard of living. In Singapore the government controls half of the business, yet Singapore is probably more successful than Honk-Kong. Once we could be proud of Ireland which had a limited government and tremendous growth, but now Ireland is bankrupt.
There are historical problems as well. During the American Gilded age the growth rate was a bit smaller than the growth rate in America in the 20th century. Besides almost all western countries have moved from limited government to full blown welfare state, even Honk-Kong now introduces minimum wages.
So guys, do we have evidence that shows that libertarian policies lead to more prosperity? I think we need to have this evidence in order to persuade others.
It’s kinda hard to FIND libertarian states in the first place.
But seriously, you can point to free-market tendencies of coutries as a cause for their wealth. It’s not easy, as you have to build the argument on history of each country and show where it went from, where it is and where it is going. Many of today’s welfare states build on decades of capitalism (see e.g. the strong free market tradition in the Scandinavian countries), are still wealthy but are comparatively slipping. The West is still quite wealthy, but it is stagnating, etc… there are no anomalies here, just the principles of economics, that can take decades to show all of the effects.
" I think we need to have this evidence in order to persuade others."
Well i think it would be impossible to give you a purely libertarian society…but think about it… when China started using market economics in their policies, they prospered a lot and it was at one point the fasting growing developing nation because of that policy…
If you read the philosophy of Marx, he says it is necessary to have capitalism in order to achieve communism, it is part of the transition stage between capitalism to communism and it would merge with a socialism to communism stage… because even Marx would admit that capitalism is the fastest way to achieve capital for a nation… once a nation has enough capital, the transition would start to happen and slowly transform the country to a socialism state then to a pure communism state.
A great example of the early transition stage is to look at Lenin policy when he was in charge of Russia… Once the marxists took over Russia, they needed a way to attain capital, so Lenin signed the “new economic policy”, which granted businesses to take part in free market activites. He was later criticized by other commis that his policy was too much free market based…
There are no libertarian states therefore no proof of their success can be found.
Measuring states’ economic prosperity in correlation to their “libertarianism” is problematic. You will find, however, that the states leading most economic prosperity indexes have the highest market-freedom (not their necessarily their libertarianism; you can have a perfectly-free market but operate a large welfare system).
