Economic Miracles Come in Similar Packages --- Free Market Reforms Work!

|Peter Boettke|

Larry White has a great op-ed in today's WSJ addressing the policy steps that produced the German economic miracle after WWII.

Comments

[Jerry O'Driscoll]

Larry's piece is highly recommended. He notes that today Germany is growing at a Reaganesque pace of a 9% annualized rate in the second quarter, compared to the anemic US pace.

Up with Ludwig Earhard and down with Keynes. Let's trade Treasury Secretary Geithner for Germany's Finance Minister Wolgang Schauble plus a player to be named in the future.

[Mario Rizzo]

Larry's article is great.

I wish we had a Ludwig Erhard (even though he was "only" an Ordo-liberal.)

[Pietro M.]

Great article.

[Rafe Champion]

Tyler Cowen wrote a paper on the Marshall Plan to demonstrate that the Plan impeded recovery and both Belguim and Germany recovered pre-Plan due to good economic policy.
This is a summary of the paper,
http://www.the-rathouse.com/2009/Marshall-Plan.html

This is the original
http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/Marshall_Plan.pdf

[The Cuttlefish of Cthulu]

How old is that Cowen paper? Given that he takes an actual stand on the issue, I'm guessing it was written at least 20 years ago. He'd better hope it doesn't come to the attention of his benefactors at the New York Times.

[Rafe Champion]

When I posted the notice I checked and he said he was still happy with the argument. As a professor and a prolific writer he can probabably scrape by without help from the NYT, and he has a food site so he must know where to get the cheapest eats if he has to take in his belt a notch or two.
http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/ethnicguide2010.htm

[Ashwin]

If anyone's interested, Ludwig Erhard's book on the subject "Prosperity Through Competition" is a free download over at mises.org http://mises.org/resources/4333/Prosperity-Through-Competition .

Also worth noting that many of his main critics at that time were incumbent capitalists who benefited from the controls in place, much like many of the people who complained loudest when the NRA price controls were removed were incumbent firms http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,787937,00.html . Erhard's policies were driven as much by the social injustice and inequalities perpetrated by crony capitalism as the crippling effect it had on growth.

If you can find a copy I'd also recommend Edwin Hartrich's "Fourth and Richest Reich" on the same topic.