[wizofaus]

That sounds very much like a conveniently right-wing potted history. I'd be willing to bet the truth is rather more subtle*. Either way, they were both examples of economies that only got off the ground because of massive government spending.

(*) a quick read of a wikipedia article about the Japanese economic miracle - which undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda - certainly confirms this. At best relaxing anti-monopoly laws was an example of legislation reform that helped further boost the already impressive recovery that had occurred during the 50s.

[WalterBright]

Um, where did Germany get "massive government spending"? If you say "the Marshall Plan", look up the MP on wikipedia. Germany did get MP money, but far less than Britain and France did. The latter two did not have a "British Miracle" or "French Miracle".

[wizofaus]

I didn't claim the spending was the prime cause of any "miracle", but it's fairly certain it wouldn't have happened without it. France and the UK did have impressive recoveries too, that would have been impossible without the MP etc.

FWIW I would actually expect the fact that because the priority at the time was economic recovery before everything else, red tape wasn't allowed to get in the way to the degree it often seems to once prosperity had been restored. I'd even say that's probably a reasonable trade off, though it certainly doesn't justify governments letting growing businesses get away with whatever they feel like. Nobody likes bureaucracy or red tape, but almost always it's what we end up with as a result of repeated cases of corporate behaviour that's widely agreed to be unacceptable.

[WalterBright]

> undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda

Leftists always mis-attribute the causes of prosperity. The wikipedia article cites causes that are commonplace in other countries that had no miracle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle

Leftist economies have never experienced an economic miracle in any country.

East Germany, for example (compared with West Germany).

[wizofaus]

Nobody here is arguing a fully socialist command-and-control economy is a better choice.

But you haven't made any sort of case that the German or Japanese "miracles" were largely due to raw unrestrained capitalism. There are way too many factors that made those particular countries special cases at the time to pinpoint all the primary causes, let alone tease out various secondary factors some of which probably tempered rather than accelerated growth.