Food For Thought: Libertarian Economics

From the Angry Bear blog:

... a decade before the end of Japan's economic miracle, the fabled bureaucracy that drove Japan Inc. started to erode - more of its members started coming from lower quality, private universities, it stopped being held in as high esteem by the public, it lost its ability to impose its will on the economy, and to boot (or perhaps I should say on a related note), it started to adopt new policies and philosophies being pushed by the Reagan administration. How long do you think it takes for something like that to have a long-term, possibly irreversible effect on an economy that used to be the envy of the world?

As an aside... ever notice how countries that adopt policies favored by right wing or libertarian think-tanks tend to have a few very successful years (with much crowing by those think tanks) followed by disaster? Be it Japan, Argentina, Russia, much of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Iceland, etc., it does seem that there's a pattern. Heck, that pattern even applies to the US. I think even some of the promoters of those policies are starting to see that pattern. Its to the point where a lot of folks in those circles are trying to convince the public that Singapore, a country where the government's role in the economy is larger and more intrusive than in most other countries, is an example of a libertarian paradise.

Could it be that when you take a social animal like humans and tell them they are purely rational calculators, homo economicus, with no moral or social relationships except through freely entered "contracts" that you destroy the social fabric and point the society down the slippery slope of economic chaos? I think so because this political philosophy is the ideal one for sociopaths. They come out of the woodwork and end up devouring the society is a wave of economic crime like the US has seen in the first decade of the new millennium.