[sam h]

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His charge is that government involvement is what made Japan, etc. prosperous. I made a comparison to its neighbors to show government intervention doesn't help.

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The more one studies these things, the more it becomes obvious that it is analytically useless to talk in blanket terms about the effects of "government intervention." But if you look at these cases, it is also obvious that certain forms of government intervention were absolutely critical to their success. There is nobody who is a serious student of Japanese or Korean developmental history who really disputes this.

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Even in China today, the more government the worse it works. Those state owned factories still destroy value. It is private companies that are largely exempt from China's governmental rules that are propering the most.

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The state-owned enterprises are probably disasters, but that is only one (extreme) form of government intervention. Others, especially those that have secured political stability as a byproduct, may have been absolutely critical. Your statement that "the more government the worse it works" is basically unsupportable. Political economy is far more complex than you think, and blanket propositions like thse are almost always wrong.

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Also, many interventionist policies pursued by Japan have resulted in thier 15 year recession. They have been trying to get rid of them, not add to them.

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Some interventionist policies have certainly contributed to the recession. But the primary problem are political - the lack of political will to deal with the banking sector and really allocate certain costs and the realities of dealing with an aging population.