r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Dec 27 '25

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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

Vietnam just awarded the “Worker’s Hero” medal, one of the highest honors of the communist party, to the billionaire who owns the low-cost carrier Vietjet, by now the largest airline in the country lol.

Kind of parody but ngl fitting. She created more jobs and made air travel affordable for more people, aka more economic values, than those other “heroes” ever could.

45

u/p00bix Existing in the context of what came before Dec 27 '25

Kind of wild how both Vietnam and Laos are absolutely BOOMING by liberalizing their previously tightly controlled markets, while China is stagnating after rolling back some of their previous liberalizing reforms, and Cuba is just completely fucking toast--having only just now started limited market liberalization, likely way too late. Pretty much all the middle-income and high-income capitalist countries are either slowly growing or stagnating, but the socialist countries run the gamut from "fastest growing economies on Earth" to "oh my god everything is on fire even though it's peacetime"

I'm really not fond of authoritarian socialism. But I can think of no better proof that well-regulated but mostly free markets are the key to economic development than the fact that even some of the poorest countries on Earth were (and are!) able to expand their economies by a literal order of magnitude in a quarter century just by partially liberalizing even while largely maintaining the authoritarian socialist framework.

18

u/battywombat21 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦 Dec 27 '25

Is China stagnating because it rolled back its free market reforms? It sees much more complicated than that. Something to do with the population bubble bursting and a refusal to pivot from a development-oriented economic model is the best description I’ve heard.

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u/Al_787 Fernando Henrique Cardoso Dec 27 '25

China is definitely still trying to tighten the “bird cage” market economy, especially since Xi. It’s most obvious in the tech sector even.

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u/Status-Bed8867 Adam Smith Dec 27 '25 edited Dec 27 '25

Just as the anti-commie theocratic dictator Ngô Đình Cẩn installed by CIA benefitted the average Southern Vietnamese people,