Why is Laissez-Faire/Free Trade supposed to be a good thing?

[Thistletooth]

...It hasn't been for me, anyway.

Typically, once I get my economy going (I'll use Sweden as an example, since I've done better with them than I have with anyone else so far), I'm making roughly 60-180 pounds/day profit, depending on whether or not I have enacted my grand social reforms, or if I'm expecting a war. I am importing no more than 40 pounds worth of goods (I produce almost no raw goods besides iron and sometimes coal), and making roughly 40-100 pounds on maximum tariffs (which I often need in order to develop without abolishing my military or eliminating crime fighting). And all this is under a Protectionist/Interventionist government, the typical Swedish/Scandinavian conservative party.

Now, when I received a Laissez-Faire/Free Trade party (I say "receive" since my stupid clerks always force it on me), my import costs drop to about 30 pounds/day, and my tariffs drop to no more than 10 pounds/day. That's a daily loss of roughly 50-60 pounds. That hurts a lot! What's worse, the Laissez-Faire free trade party, by refusing to allow me to enact social reforms, tends to screw me over in the long run. Without social programs (which are very difficult to afford early on before I get my clerk population up), my POPs get highly militant by the 1880's at the very latest. By that point, their consciousness has risen to a high level anyway, despite the lack of tariffs (my clergy still has no effect on my craftsmen).

What confuses me is that I have heard in a few threads that L-F/FT parties are supposed to be the best for your economy. Howso exactly? So far, I have seen no ways in which a L-F/FT party works for me at all. I do everything in my power to avoid them, including shutting down some factories and replacing the POPs with soldiers and officers, or regressing my economy from manufacturing to extraction, and converting my clerks/craftsmen into more palatable (though much less profitable) farmers/laborers.

I'm sure I must be missing something here.

 

[unmerged(16181)]

Well, free trade is better in the long term because tariffs raise your POPs' militancy. At the beginning of the game, though, I would certainly prefer a protectionist party.

As far as laissez-faire, I'm not sure why you'd want them.

 

[Lamprey]

It sounds like you're relying on tariffs too much. You usually end up with a liberal party only when the majority of your population are liberals, meaning craftsmen, clerks, or capitalists (you do have universal suffrage, don't you?). By the time that happens, somewhere in the mid 1850s or 1860s, your having so many of those pops means you're an industrialized nation and tariffs are 10-15% of your income, so losing them won't matter. Also, in this case the liberal party in power has the beneficial effects of lowering the militancy of the majority of your population and lowering tariff income.

If you're getting a liberal party too early, you likely have wealth voting allowed; change that to suffrage and the conservative farmers/laborers will vote a conservative party into power.

If you're getting it in the 50s and 60s and it hurts your economy, you need to change the way you run your economy. Build more profitable factories, promote capitalists, research economic techs and you should be ok. But whatever you do, "regressing" your economy by demoting your middle class is the worst thing you can do as it negates your industrialization effort thus far and forces you to make even less money.

 

[Cavalry]

free trade raise CON only, so they will vote for their issue/idealogy!
Laisser fair parties reduce any import cost to 1/2.

Free trade is total not good for economy, but free trade parties is often liberal. The liberal party usually can be voted only when you have a decent industrial with a lot of capitalists and clerks. So if you are monarchy and let the liberals to took power, you are a bad King! At the time the liberal voted, you should not concern much about tariff. And the democracy liberal will stop emigration and bring some immigrations.

 

[Thistletooth]

It sounds like you're relying on tariffs too much. You usually end up with a liberal party only when the majority of your population are liberals, meaning craftsmen, clerks, or capitalists (you do have universal suffrage, don't you?). By the time that happens, somewhere in the mid 1850s or 1860s, your having so many of those pops means you're an industrialized nation and tariffs are 10-15% of your income, so losing them won't matter. Also, in this case the liberal party in power has the beneficial effects of lowering the militancy of the majority of your population and lowering tariff income.

If you're getting a liberal party too early, you likely have wealth voting allowed; change that to suffrage and the conservative farmers/laborers will vote a conservative party into power.

If you're getting it in the 50s and 60s and it hurts your economy, you need to change the way you run your economy. Build more profitable factories, promote capitalists, research economic techs and you should be ok. But whatever you do, "regressing" your economy by demoting your middle class is the worst thing you can do as it negates your industrialization effort thus far and forces you to make even less money.

Well, the first thing I do in any game is to build some more factories (I find that fabric, reg. clothes, lumber and paper are the most cost-effective until around 1880, when I start building more steel) and convert as many farmers/laborers into craftsman/clerks as I can. I kinda go breakneck for the first decade. That typically means that within 10-15 years, I get the L-F/FT party, whether I have "Wealth" or "Suffrage" voting rights; my craftsmen always outnumber my peasants and laborers. If their consciousness is low (which is isn't), that might buy me a couple of more elections, but if I don't go at least 50% on my tariffs, I can't afford to build many factories or rail lines.

I also go 100% on my education budget, and cut all crime fighting expenditures for the first 40 years, to help out. Again, though, without the tariffs, I'm very limited in what I can do. Perhaps there a few other ways I can reduce my spending...?

I like to build rail lines in every province as soon as I can (factories are still more important, though). Is that a short- to medium-term loss? Do I even need railroads in every province?

I know to keep my military everything at minimum unless I feel threatened, which I never do as Sweden/Scandinavia unless I'm planning a war or once I've made an enemy out of both Russia and Prussia/Germany, so I spend almost nothing there. I don't even build new units. I'm still using Men o' War and Frigates in the 1890's.

 

[Darkrenown]

As far as laissez-faire, I'm not sure why you'd want them.

Half price imports

 

[unmerged(16181)]

Half price imports

Ah. I was...unaware of that.

 

[De_Genius]

refresh my memory: how do I go from MON to DEM ? I know that 2 reforms must be renacted simutainously but which ?

Also LF does exactly what ? Are they the one making social reforms impossible ?

 

[Thistletooth]

refresh my memory: how do I go from MON to DEM ? I know that 2 reforms must be renacted simutainously but which ?

Also LF does exactly what ? Are they the one making social reforms impossible ?

Free Parties and Universal Suffrage, I would imagine. But I've enacted both of those before, and sometimes I remain a Constitutional Monarchy.

Laissez-Faire prevents you from increasing any social reforms, only rolling them back. That's a real killer when your POPs are mad at you.

 

[Lamprey]

Thistletooth, you could always change voting rights to landed, aristocrats tend to vote conservative. Also, are you promoting the biggest pops you can find in your states to capitalists? You want an overall 10-15% of your population to be capitalist.

 

[unmerged(9404)]

Free Parties and Universal Suffrage, I would imagine. But I've enacted both of those before, and sometimes I remain a Constitutional Monarchy.

You can never change from ConMon to democracy through political reforms

 

[Thistletooth]

Thistletooth, you could always change voting rights to landed, aristocrats tend to vote conservative. Also, are you promoting the biggest pops you can find in your states to capitalists? You want an overall 10-15% of your population to be capitalist.

...No. They probably make up less than 1%. I've never tried fiddling with them before.

Does a Capitalist increase a factory's production more than adding a craftsman or a clerk do? And would two Capitalists in the same province double the boost? What about in the same state? Finally, do 40K Capitalists grant a larger bonus than 3K? I'm going to assume so, but just for confirmation's sake.

And "voting rights - landed"? I always feel so evil doing that. My POPs would probably feel the same way.

You can never change from ConMon to democracy through political reforms

Good.

Unless it stunts immigration. In which case: Bad.

 

[Lamprey]

Don't waste your money promoting any pop smaller than 20k to capitalists; try to find pops of size 50k or more to promote.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

The formula for capitalist production increase is:

Capitalists{}:
Capitalists = {1 + (0.1 * capitalist_bonus) * eff capitalists}.
eff capitalists = (all capitalist pops added up)/ 100.000

So, the onlky things that matter are.
1. The total amount of capitalist people (not pops) inside a state, and your capitalist bonus modifier.

At 0 tech, 100 000 captalists increase your production amount by 10%. of cource, this means that after 10 craftsmen/clerks (in any factories) in a state the rest of the 100000 pops should go capitalists. But, as most pops are a lot smaller, and none bigger you should have alittle more craftsmen/clerks. Then again, with tech the modifier goes as up as 14%, and while capitalists increase production, they dont increase raw material needs, which means they are even better than they sound like... Generally, in the endgame anything smaller than 30k goes to a factory, anyhting bigger becomes a capitalists, assuming there are at least 10 of the smaller ones. Yes, this means that in the endgame very very high % of the population are capitalists. Indirectly this means that all the poor people are socialists, as the capitalists rob them of all they're income, but then again, that's just the price the poor bastards have to pay for a highly succesful economy

 

[Cavalry]

that poor suffer a social bug! But you are to save them by set the tax of the poor to 0%!

 

[Gwalcmai]

Unless you happen to get one of those parties with "Planned economy", or whatever it's called, which don't allow taxes to be below 20%...

And it feels really weird to have the poor and the middle classes have their needs fulfilled and getting a nice amount of savings while the poor rich can't even afford their needs and are groaning under 49,22% taxes.

 

[LewsTherin]

Robin Hood!!! :rofl:
Take from the rich and give to the poor. And me, the richest of them all, gets everything like the evil bastard overliege that I am. Muahahahaha

 

[LM+]

The formula for capitalist production increase is:

Capitalists{}:
Capitalists = {1 + (0.1 * capitalist_bonus) * eff capitalists}.
eff capitalists = (all capitalist pops added up)/ 100.000

So, the onlky things that matter are.
1. The total amount of capitalist people (not pops) inside a state, and your capitalist bonus modifier.

At 0 tech, 100 000 captalists increase your production amount by 10%. of cource, this means that after 10 craftsmen/clerks (in any factories) in a state the rest of the 100000 pops should go capitalists. But, as most pops are a lot smaller, and none bigger you should have alittle more craftsmen/clerks. Then again, with tech the modifier goes as up as 14%, and while capitalists increase production, they dont increase raw material needs, which means they are even better than they sound like... Generally, in the endgame anything smaller than 30k goes to a factory, anyhting bigger becomes a capitalists, assuming there are at least 10 of the smaller ones. Yes, this means that in the endgame very very high % of the population are capitalists. Indirectly this means that all the poor people are socialists, as the capitalists rob them of all they're income, but then again, that's just the price the poor bastards have to pay for a highly succesful economy

Wow, that's useful. If this information isn't already available, it should be a part of a FAQ.

This really changes how one looks at your economy: Populous / POP-rich states are much more powerful than mere numbers would indicate, while less-populated areas are *real* backwaters. The economics field of tech research is revealed to be truly important.

 

[unmerged(30240)]

L-F/FT is the only way to play a successful campaign in the US. As for protectionism early, it depends upon how rapidly you wish to industrialize.