/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>1482
>The Free-market is what made America great

Can we get off this complete bit of revisionist history? From the start, America had a Mercantilist economy, started by the British. It dominated until Adam Smith's ideas did in the late 1800s, which didn't gain enough steam until the early industrial revolution. By the time we were embracing the Free Market, it was already 1910.

Most of the Industrial Revolution's great inventions and ideas happened before this. All Free Market Capitalism did was string out and pump up a good time, but ultimately lead straight to the great depression. After that, we were a social-safety mixed economy for a while, until the 50's after the war.

And you can call that period a "Golden age of international Free Market Capitalism" because of the lowering of trade barriers all you want, but in reality, it was just mercantilism by any other name. The reason why trade barriers were a bad thing for the U.S. at the time was because it was the only major player on the World Stage that wasn't Communist, so it served American interests to get rid of Trade Barriers for two reasons: to export American Capitalist thought, and to knock out any local competition and dominate economies for years to come.

Now that there's actual competition, adhering to a Free Market dogma is only killing us. Not only because we can't truly compete due to our standard of living, but because it's basic game theory. If you set up the game so that you'll always capitulate, and you tell the other side you're always going to capitulate, eventually the other side won't capitulate as well. Eventually, they'll take advantage of the situation.

All those "libertarian paradises" like Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Chile that libertarians love to crow on about are really just Mercantilist countries anyway. The only difference is, instead of literal trade barriers through tariffs, they just use targeted subsidies to kill any foreign competition.

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