> Your comment about Austrian economics never having been implemented reminds me of leftists who say communism has never been implemented so we can’t say communism doesn’t work
Maybe, however the difference being that there are many countries and regions that have claimed to be communist for over a century but none that have claimed to be adhering to Austrian Economics.
> pretty much every country implemented Austrian economics principles
Looking at history I’m seeing pretty much every country having a government controlled and manipulated currency, mercantilist restraint of trade, guilds and unions with government enforced monopolies fixing prices, central banks, pseudo-governmental corporations, and on and on. Those are all antithetical to Austrian economic principles. Can you point me to the overwhelming historical examples you were referring to?
1870 U.S. is one example. There was restraint of international trade but that trade wasn't much and it didn't have the capacity to be much. A continental sized country at a time when transportation was still limited that used a gold standard satisfies the condition of "implemented Austrian economic principles".
They were implemented in the same way one says that communism has been tried and it failed. It wasn't true communism and it wasn't true Austrianism. Government intervention has shortened recession/depression lengths and lengthened the time between them. It's a lot better than Austrianism.
I'm not going to convince you of anything and vice versa. My comment is for anyone who happens to be reading the thread. Hopefully they will have read enough perspective on this to make a semi-informed decision.
> A continental sized country at a time when transportation was still limited that used a gold standard satisfies the condition of "implemented Austrian economic principles".
Merely having a gold standard in a nationally regulated currency where contracts in that jurisdiction must accept payment in that currency in order to be enforceable is not an implementation of Austrian economic principles.
> They were implemented in the same way one says that communism has been tried and it failed.
You say the examples of AE implementation are overwhelmingly numerous, you give one extremely dubious example of a single superficial similarity to back that up. Can you even point to a single country that claimed to be implementing Austrian Economics? I can point to any number of places that claimed to be Keynesian or Communist, and even one or two that were giving Friedman a try but no Austrians. Your comparison to Communism are nonsense.
Hard to claim to have implemented a system before a word for that system was invented. Small groups of people were wildly successful in implementing the idea of shared ownership/responsibility way before the word communism was invented.
Lots of large societies had systems of governance where the vast majority of the economic system was free of government control/safeguards and where the value of the currency was not controlled by the government. As societies grew larger/complicated and concentrated more in urban areas people became aware that government intervention was a good thing if done properly. As with all things if done badly then the intervention is not a good thing.
>Hard to claim to have implemented a system before a word for that system was invented.
You said "pretty much every country" had implemented them, and the name has been around for well over a century, it's actually one of the older active schools of Economics these days, we have hundreds of countries and many more in recent history and none of them have claimed to have implemented Austrian Economics? The comparison remains total nonsense.
Maybe, however the difference being that there are many countries and regions that have claimed to be communist for over a century but none that have claimed to be adhering to Austrian Economics.