Neither does no planning and complete decentralization (no national industrial policy, no trade barriers, letting important supply chains move out of your control or even into the borders of your adversaries).
Many of the most successful free market economies embody the concept of "was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."
The United States and Canada had relatively easy access to territorial expansion, which offered them huge amounts of fertile, temperate land and almost any natural resource needed. They also started with a high-immigrant and relatively educated population.
South Korea got to build their economy late enough to be relatively unburdened by legacy costs. They also had a Western world more than willing to ignore a series of presidents-for-life, domestic crackdowns, and incestuous government-industry relationships as long as they kept Kim Il-Sung up in the attic.
Even Singapore had the advantage of being ideally located for trade purposes.
With those benefits, was the free market necessary to unlock their success?
Conversely, if you dropped (say) the American Founders in 1917 Moscow or 1948 Peking, would they do any better?
Russia has even more natural resources. Doesn't seem to help.
> if you dropped (say) the American Founders in 1917 Moscow or 1948 Peking, would they do any better?
Absolutely. See Hong Kong, Japan & Germany after WW2, Chile does better when they go free market, does worse when they veer back left, etc. South American countries have vast resources, but little prosperity.
US immigration consisted of people in abject poverty, who arrived illiterate with nothing but a suitcase.
Re South America: Guatemala had incredible, almost miraculous success when Jacobo Árbenz did his landmark land reforms. The idea was simple: (1) unused land over X ha was expropriated (and the owners compensated), and distributed to previously landless peasants, and (2) credit lines were made available for those peasants to buy farm equipment, do renovations, etc.
The success was astounding. We're talking child mortality being halved and poverty rates dropping off a cliff, in only a few years. Of course, US businesses did not like it very much and US imperialism shut it down in violent fashion, and Guatemala has been an unstable and violent place ever since, with a long string of brutal dictators.
What is "funny" in a deeply grim and sad sense is that this was at once socialism (i.e. means of production to the people who work, rather than a separation between those who work and those who own), but also very much the American Dream: a plot of land which was your own, for you to work, and where you own the fruits of your labour. You, not a king, not a robber baron, you. That's why the violent stampdown by the US is especially disgusting and hypocritical.
As for Chile, it had a democratically elected left-wing government. Even if Pinochet's economic policy turned out better (which it by most measures did not), NOTHING can justify a violent operation to overthrow that government, to the tune of tens of thousands of tortures and deaths, to implant one that pursues your favoured brand of economics.
> Mining a bunch of copper, helping your cronies get rich, and pumping up land prices is not a "miracle".
And that's from an ideologically aligned source.
> This record is less bad than Allende’s, but it’s far from what I’d call good, and it’s certainly nothing that anyone should call an economic “miracle”.
But Russia has very limited access to viable shipping lanes and huge geographic barriers to shipping things overland. Why do you think Crimea is of such importance to Russia?
Lovely to hear this kind of thing on HN :) The free market looks like 'chaos' because it has millions of people making economic prioritisation decisions, as opposed to a control economy with few people. Millions of people making prioritising inputs vs a few, leads to a far more effectively prioritised economy, surely. And the proof is in the pudding!
Sometimes I think I'm the only person on HN who writes anything positive about free markets, which are the source of the great wealth in the United States and some other countries.
I really don't understand the romance with leftism, where the historical record of its implementations is pretty miserable.
It's never worth discussing political economy with die-hard free market types, because the they claim the US is a free market when it suits them, then deny it's a free market (calling it "crony capitalism", for example) if you point out legitimate flaws in the economic system.
Not to mention, the notion that the US was a free market at any point in its history is unequivocally false, and anyone who thinks a system that observes slavery qualifies as a free market should be embarrassed.
The US was never a 100% free market. But it was pretty close, and the beauty of a free market is the closer it is, the better it works.
> anyone who thinks a system that observes slavery qualifies as a free market should be embarrassed.
I usually say "excluding the slave south". Nevertheless, let's compare the slave south with the free north. The free north economically buried the slave south, which was a major cause of the southern rebellion. They wanted to protect their economy from the depredations of free labor.
The south lost the war because the north buried them with arms and supplies and trains and everything needed in plentiful supply to destroy the southern barefoot armies.
A similar thing happened in both WW1 and WW2. The American free market decided the fate of Germany and Japan the day the US entered the war, because Germany and Japan simply were overwhelmed. The US supplied not only themselves, but supplied Britain, France, and Russia, and still buried Japan with overwhelming endless supplies of everything the military wanted.
The Japanese understood this (Hitler didn't), and tried to win WW2 with one stroke (Pearl Harbor). When that failed, they put everything on the line at Midway. The carriers were sunk, their best pilots were killed, the planes were lost, and Japan could not replace them, and everything went downhill for them from there. The US lost carriers and airplanes and just built lots more.
Hitler lost WW2 the day he declared war on the US, in probably the stupidest military move in history. You can't win against a free market country unless yours is free market, too.
You can low price tickets for Hamilton now. It's a great show and has some interesting bits Hamilton's contribution to, as fictional James Madison put it "nothing less than government control".
Well, the part of the China's economy that works isn't centrally planned.
They do seem to have a very planned part (looks like so from the other side of the world), that isn't internationally competitive. But simply claiming that their economy is planned is clearly wrong.
The specific failure modes we keep seeing are 1) having a country run by an autocrat who does not listen to advice, and ruthlessly stifles all dissent; and 2) using measures as targets.
