And the UK, and Canada, and Australia, and most other places in the first world at the time. They bore zero resemblance to the cesspools you're describing.
The key words in your reply are "at the time"...because the standards of living in first-world democracies at THAT time doesn't compare well to the standards of living in quite a few third-world democracies
today.
All three of those nations chose to increase their levels of social services, the social safety nets that y'all so decry...and none of them - indeed, NONE of the first-world democracies outside America - are considering even for a moment going back to the way things were. They know that they have it far better now than they did before.
Again, go to a third-world democracy and live there for a while...and when you do so, go live among the people, away from the touristy areas, away from the rich areas (which is what I did), so you can learn four things:
(1) that in a third-world democracy, people are in many ways FREER than we are here in America - you can do pretty much what you want, wherever and however you want to do it, and as long as you're not actively harming someone else (and sometimes even if you are harming someone else), the local government will not care, and
(2) that because people are so much freer, because there's so much LESS government oversight, most people can avoid taxes if they want. They can avoid most or all of the little government-mandated fees that we see on our power and phone bills. They can smuggle pretty much whatever they want (I once avoided thousands of dollars' worth of import duties by paying the customs officer a relatively small bribe), and one can easily avoid jail time if one has money (I once paid off a judge to get my brother-in-law out of jail), and that every cop you meet is open (and usually eager) to accept bribes (the local traffic cops worked on
commission - they would actually receive a portion of the tickets they wrote...but since they would not receive the money for a couple months, they would happily take a much smaller bribe from the driver). You learn that in such places, such bribery and corruption is NORMAL, is EXPECTED. Why?
Because the tax revenues are so low that the civil servants - including most law enforcement - are poorly paid...and that the bribes are necessary for them just to put food on the table. That's also why the roads, the power lines, and most other types of infrastructure are so dilapidated - the tax revenues are nowhere near enough to bring them up to first-world status. That's also why the houses are not built to code, why the dams are poorly maintained, why most cars on the road spew black exhaust (it was NORMAL for me to clean black soot out of my nostrils at the end of every day) - there's not enough tax revenue to even ensure the simple safety and health regulations that you and I take for granted in America, and
(3) third-world nations are dirty for a REASON. It's hard to get people who are dirt-poor, who worry every day about having something to eat, to worry about keeping their environs clean. There's not enough tax revenue to build and maintain sanitary infrastructure. Yes, there's sewers, but they're often very insufficient for the need. There's trash trucks...but far fewer than what's needed, and
(4) because there's no
enforceable minimum wage, that wages are kept very, very low. Why? Because the competition is such that prices are slashed to the bone...and when businesses slash their prices so low, it's normal that the only way the owners can stay in business is by slashing their workers' wages. My son's fiancee (before they were married) worked at a place where the minimum wage was about five dollars a day...but she was paid two dollars a day. She couldn't do anything about it, either - if she complained, she would lose her job...and whoever she complained to could be easily bribed to look the other way. The minimum wage there is thus unenforceable...all because the tax revenue is so low that the civil servants need the bribes in order to put food on the table.
High taxes, sir, are the price of admission to life in a first-world nation. If you can't stand paying high taxes (and put up with the government and regulations that enable the nation to reliably collect that tax revenue), then go live in a third-world country since you're not willing to pay the price of admission to life here.
