Nick Szabo  🔑

How does Hong Kong fit in vs. China as a pure laissez faire free market under British rule? I seem to remember Milton Friedman discussing this once.

Yes I probably could add Hong Kong vs. China 1949-1997 although it may be more complicated by some other British vs. Chinese political differences not just free market vs. socialism.

I more or less agree with you but critics can argue that the political/military force on the side of Capitalist states globally was the key deciding factor in those outcomes, such as America waging economic war against Venezuela for example.

Most of these socialist regimes spent a far greater proportion of their economy on military than the corresponding capitalist one.

But yet globally outgunned politically speaking, no?

Only to the extent that they were far more outgunned economically. P.S. North Korea militarily outgunned South Korea, and the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal matched the megatons in the U.S. After the Korean War neither could seriously threaten the other in these countries.

That's a good point, maybe it was closer to a real controlled experiment than I thought. I wonder if someone could use Judea Pearl's tools to sort this all out. Anyway it's fairly obvious that individual liberty is a powerful force. Imagine a society with actually free markets!

1/4 This is the wrong format for trying to get this across... but the situation in Venezuela was and is complicated by the multiple-personality problem that socialism and Socialism/communism/Communism has.

2/4 Originally, it was an political/economic theory thought up by two guys in 19th century Germany and England, but has been constantly reinterpreted through the needs of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Deng, etc...

3/4 Chavez basically came to power saying "Let's help the poor people like Karl said we should" but then came in and decided he had to take action to help his allies like China and Russia, and on (his) principle Fight Back Against The US.

China is far more controlled political than Venezuela. I definitely don't agree with authoritarianism of any kind, but this is just cherry picking.

Chile, not China. Chile and Venezuela are culturally similar countries that both went through bouts of authoritarianism during this period, but for most of the period those authorities enforced very different economic systems (capitalism vs. socialism).

West Germany vs east Germany not quite fair in economic terms as the west was always more industrialized but the point still holds when considering how people voted with their feet into the west

Upper Saxony (Dresden, Leipzig, etc.) had been fairly well industrialized, and had a tradition of advanced technology going many centuries back.

I’ve been living in one since birth, the USA.

Is there something freer but otherwise culturally similar to compare it to?