How did America economically become the greatest Country?

Fishking · Dec 21, 2017

BlackMatters said:
Would it be fair to assume that the US had a "head start" on the industrial revolution because of slavery, then?

I don't think so, like I stated before, any of the economic boons from slavery were wiped out and then some from the Civil War. What gave us an advantage is that our country was oceans separated from both Wold Wars so we had our industries and infrastructure untouched and we didn't lose generations of working aged males.

Really, it's mostly just about not getting blown up with perhaps a culture that was born out of risk-takers thrown in there.

Fledermaus · Dec 21, 2017

KevinKohler said:
Slavery, then back to back world wars that leveled our competition across the pond.

This CANNOT be overstated...

Fledermaus · Dec 21, 2017

BlackMatters said:
Im from Europe and i actually want to know few things here in how America become one of the most powerful countries in the world? I know few things but I some few questions, too if someone can help me explain it better, I will gladely appreciate it

I know tobaccoo was not an example of mercantilism it was an example of capitalism, the British then tried to use mercantilism to profit from the success of tobacco in the colonies.

America would NOT have been anywhere near ready to explode in the Industrial Revolution if not for a more than 200 year head start in part due to slavery. Some estimate that by 1860 slaves had a value of 3.5 BILLION dollars to the US and a big chunk of that was tobacco(and cotton).That allowed the US, in particular the South, to grow MUCH faster than it would have otherwise grown. Slavery happened all over the world and lots of nations used slavery to get ahead economically but there are very strong arguments that no country derived more economic benefit from Slavery than the US did. Tobacco btw did not die out because of the Civil War, it was already massively in decline prior to that, the end ofgrowth of tobacco started with the Revolutionary War. It was the biggest cash crop and then got replaced over time by cotton. Obviously still a very large tobacco industry in the US(unfortunately) but it was already on the decline before the Civil War.

Saying the US economy took off after slavery was abolished is sort of like giving Trumpcredit for a stock market that was up more under his predecessor than it is under him. Things don't go from 0 to 200 in 1 second, the US economy got a more than 200 year headstart due to slavery. It's one of the things we're all aware of but don't talk about because it's frankly a terrible part of our history. What economicpolicy you think led to the US being sodominant?

If the 200 year headstart on the industrial revolution As slavery existed all over the world, throughout history up until the late 18th century when it started to die out. Literally every super power up to then was built on slavery.

Therefore, to say the US had an advantage in the industrial because of slavery is stupid.

The first power to start the abolition of slavery was the UK. Which is also where the industrial revolution started, at around the same time

how do you explain the industrial revolution starting in the UK before it started in the US? and how do you explain it happening in the north without slavery while it did not happen in the south until after the war?

So is it true that the US became the greatest superpower in history on the backs of slavery.??

If the South was more capitalist then how come all the commerce centers were in the North?

Slavery happened all over the world and lots of nations used slavery to get ahead economically but there are very strong arguments that no country derived more economic benefit from Slavery than the US did.

More than the Spanish who had a two hundred year plus head start on the US as far as slavery is concerned? The Spanish who first enslaved the Native Americans then switched to Africans due to disease killing off the locals? The Spanish who carried slaves to the New World and enslaved various nations? The Aztec, the Inca, the Mayans? How about the Philippines? Or the fact slavery existed in both Puerto Rice and Cuba long after our Civil War?

Fledermaus · Dec 21, 2017

BlackMatters said:
Would it be fair to assume that the US had a "head start" on the industrial revolution because of slavery, then?

Ummmm

No.

The industrial revolution in part replaced manpower with machine power.

As long as manpower was cheap (and self replenishing) it made no sense to invest in the machinery.

jdog21 · Dec 21, 2017

BlackMatters said:
I do thanks for clearing that up.

Back to the slavery theory; how much money capitalists in NYC made selling slave goods. which is why many of them opposed the war, did not want to lose that trade

until they realized how much money they could make selling low quality crap to the government i think..

One thing you may be over looking is around the us civil war time, the south was the agricultural center for much of the usa. So the north benefited from the cheeper priced produce that was shipped up from the south. Major exports like tobacco that benefited the south often benefited the bankers that were situated in the north. After the civil war technological advancements were made in the us at the same time they were happening in Europe. Ex. the ac dc war, us 60hz grid compared to europe 50hz grid.
If you look at europe as a whole during the industrailized peroid those countries combined far outpaced us in economical growth. But with the US being such a large area country in state trading benefited the us on both sides of the deal instead of in europe one country could lose out on the deal with the other country. Another aspect was using tarriffs and wars in europe to be able to trade with both sides of the conflicts. The more europe wared with each other the more the us benefited from it until WW1 and WW2 hurt europe so bad the us emerged above the rest.

Ahlevah · Dec 21, 2017

BlackMatters said:
So is it true that the US became the greatest superpower in history on the backs of slavery.??

No. If slavery were the key, then Spain would still own the planet. And yet Spain's descent as a world power began well before the end of slavery. On the other hand, America's ascent as a world power didn't really gather steam until the end of the 19th Century through the middle part of the 20th Century, well past the abolition of slavery. I don't think America's rise can be traced to any single thing, but a combination of things, including:

1. Respect for private property.

2. The rule of law, including laws governing contracts and commerce.

3. Entrepreneurship.

4. Cheap, abundant resources.

5. Institutions that served as checks and balances against each other, such as labor unions against corporations; a free press against government power and graft; an independent judiciary against popularly-elected legislators and politicians; etc.

6. An efficient finance and banking system, which included relatively sound money.

7. Investments in education. I don't think we can underestimate the role colleges, especially research universities, play in propelling economic growth through innovation and fostering entrepreneurship.

8. Investments in infrastructure, such as roads, ports, and waterways.

9. Two world wars in which the United States provided the materiel for it and other nations to destroy much of the productive capacity of the planet.

10. Abundant population growth, especially among a younger, more productive demographic. Immigrants who left their home countries motivated to work hard in order to make a better life for themselves, their families, and communities.

11. The people themselves. They possessed a strong work ethic and tended to deal with others honestly and fairly. A handshake was often all it took to seal a deal. I don't think that's as true as it once was, unfortunately.

This list isn't all inclusive, but it gives you an idea of some more of the possibilities.

John Prewett · Dec 22, 2017

http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/protaffectlist.html

FastPace · Dec 23, 2017

Part 1

BlackMatters said:
Im from Europe and i actually want to know few things here in how America become one of the most powerful countries in the world? I know few things but I some few questions, too if someone can help me explain it better, I will gladely appreciate it

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So is it true that the US became the greatest superpower in history on the backs of slavery.??

If the South was more capitalist then how come all the commerce centers were in the North?

The slave worked crops of the South certainly fueled the prosperity of the Northern cities as well as the GDP or National Income of the entire country of the United States.

But how the Great American Middle Class came to be, and the United States as the only super-power (post fall of Soviet Union), and the US eventually having the largest GDP of any country on earth comprises many things or many reasons. It was not solely and slavery.

I took a Developmental Economics course in university just out of my own interest and wanting to help improve my perception of things.

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

Development economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low-income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.

In that Developmental Economics course I took were shown during lecture by the professor, a graph showing the USA prior to the Industrial Revolution relative to countries in Latin America and Asia. Basically the USA was the same as them in economic prosperity. Literally. It was when the countries that became industrial powerhouses, that you then saw on the graph those countries economy grow exponentially, over the course of decades like Bitcoin with the line just skyrocketing towards the moon. The correlation seems to close to dismiss.

In fact, in a separate book I had read years ago, back in the 1700s believe it or not Mexico City was one of the most advanced and richest cities on planet earth, it in fact surpassed most US cities f the time.

Mexico City is of course rich today and improving itself though it still has things to fix about it.

FastPace · Dec 23, 2017

Part 2

I've done enough reading to know that:

#1: Liberals lie or are jut ignorant about the power of large populations. Liberals claim small populations increase a nations power and make its GDP skyrocket. They are wrong. They are either ignorant or liars. I have learned from one or more authors that all powerful countries have large populations, or at control empires which increases their human numbers. Take for example the USA. The USA is the 3rd most populated country on earth. Only China and India have larger populations. A country with a tiny population, standing alone in war, could never defeat a USA or a massive China said tiny country had a far more wealthy population. Likewise, New York City is not the United States smallest city in population, and nor is London for England and the UK. This is not accidental.

Basic Keynesian economics teaches that resources are 3 things: land (which includes crops or forestry for wood in homes etc.), people (numbers of them as well as how skilled or educated they are), and capital (machinery and tools and trucks etc.)

So, Vatican City does not have enough of any of the 3 things that constitute resources for Vatican City to ever be as powerful economically as London or NYC or even much smaller Milwaukee.

In terms of projecting military strength abroad you either need a large population (one reason why Brazil is the most militarily powerful country in Latin America) in your own country to throw bodies in the war overseas, or you need to run an empire because it enables you too take people from your Asian empire like Gurkhas, and have them fight in a war you need bodies in as the British empire did. As the American empire today does with NATO (which is essentially international forces of the American empire, just as Napoleon marched half of Europe on Russia).

Recall when that former Nazi that worked with the feminist founder of Planned Parenthood wrote the book: Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.

The author was warning superior numbers of darker skinned folks could eventually challenge white domination of planet earth. This is why Democrats and liberals (if they know, if not they jut yap out of ignorance) want black and brown skinned people to abort their offspring, and claim that becoming middle-class or rich only requires either having no children or only having one child. A stupid claim given their is sooooo much to the social science of economics that you can obtain a Ph.D. studying it. Poor Black-Americans problems are less the number of children they have and more the mere fact they are poor and come from a low caste in society. This is not to say statistically, and with common sense, postponing parenthood until you acquire skills or education enough to live middle-class won't help you. It will.

#2: Conservatives lie or are just ignorant about reinvesting part of the National Income (which equals GDP) into its population, its citizens if it is a democracy, and its subjects if it is an absolute monarchy.

Reinvestment is like: building or improving infrastructure; education; blue collar vocational skills etc.

In other words it is the opposite of what the USA has done to Camden, New Jersey. But Republicans like Democrats want people in Camden held down. They are fine with token few "getting out." And blacks looooooooooove to parade their token few. Because they are not Germans or Jews. The latter two are not satisfied with tokens--they raise the people.

#3: There is the exporting monopoly the USA after WWII ended up having due to all other industrial powers (e.g., England, Germany, Japan) having had infrastructure bombed. But you can read up on that for yourself.

Today the USA no longer enjoys such an exporting monopoly.

Being a center for innovation has helped. But today most of that comes from foreign students and workers coming to the USA, not so much from native born Americans.

FastPace · Dec 23, 2017

Fishking said:
I don't think so, like I stated before, any of the economic boons from slavery were wiped out and then some from the Civil War.

Exactly how? A bankrupt nation has no money to become competitive. The industrial North and all its banks remained just fine. I don't know the economic history of the Civil War but I'll roll the dice and guess it was driven by debt to foreign nations just like the Revolutionary War was.

Blacks remained in the South as agrarian sharecroppers anyways, which for them was essentially slavery (financially) except that their body and person was not owned by another, just their labor. And violence still was used in the South all the way into what... the damned 1960s?

This woman was too young to have even been born in the late 1800s but she still recalls violence used on the sharecropping fields of the South she toiled on.

This man claims it took place, too, and not just by white men but angry black men intent on inflicting pain on black women that worked in the fields with them.

Here is a video of an elderly woman that had a grandfather that lived as a child seeing slavery, his enslaved black mother, on a Southern plantation. He was mulatto and his father was the slave owner of the plantation. His father and his father's white wife treated him good.

But yes... slavery was not the only thing that economically propelled the USA forward. Industrialization did and it grew the US economy exponentially. Countries like the USA and Brazil are helped by their land size (and its diversity) which are the size of "continents." Hell, England is small enough to fit in side the State of California. So, while there is mass poverty throughout Brazil, that does not prevent Brazil from having one of the largest GDPs on earth. It's land produces so much value and there is so much of that land. Like the United States.

The United Kingdom is a series of countries (like the EU is) and not a single country like England is. England presides as the head of the United Kingdom. Germany and Brazil and the USA are single countries though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

1 United States 18,624,450
— European Union[n 1][19] 16,408,364
2 China[n 2] 11,232,108
3 Japan 4,936,543
4 Germany 3,479,232
5 United Kingdom 2,629,188
6 France 2,466,472
7 India 2,263,792
8 Italy 1,850,735
9 Brazil 1,798,622
10 Canada 1,529,760
11 South Korea 1,411,042
12 Russia[n 3] 1,283,162
13 Australia 1,261,645
14 Spain 1,232,597

blackjack50 · Dec 23, 2017

cuban smokes said:
bribery, blackmail, brute military power, assassination, coups, pretty much all the good stuff .................

I love you how left out free market economy, major financial centers, economic stability, heavy purchasing and social mobility for even lower classes, and basically all the major factors that allowed us to actually be stronger than other nations. In fact. I would argue that it was our lack of bribery, Black mail, assassination and all of that...that was the general actions of other nations that we deliberately avoided on the governmental level that kept people coming back to us.

blackjack50 · Dec 23, 2017

FastPace said:
Exactly how? A bankrupt nation has no money to become competitive. The industrial North and all its banks remained just fine. I don't know the economic history of the Civil War but I'll roll the dice and guess it was driven by debt to foreign nations just like the Revolutionary War was.

Blacks remained in the South as agrarian sharecroppers anyways, which for them was essentially slavery (financially) except that their body and person was not owned by another, just their labor. And violence still was used in the South all the way into what... the damned 1960s?

This woman was too young to have even been born in the late 1800s but she still recalls violence used on the sharecropping fields of the South she toiled on.

This man claims it took place, too, and not just by white men but angry black men intent on inflicting pain on black women that worked in the fields with them.

Here is a video of an elderly woman that had a grandfather that lived as a child seeing slavery, his enslaved black mother, on a Southern plantation. He was mulatto and his father was the slave owner of the plantation. His father and his father's white wife treated him good.

But yes... slavery was not the only thing that economically propelled the USA forward. Industrialization did and it grew the US economy exponentially. Countries like the USA and Brazil are helped by their land size (and its diversity) which are the size of "continents." Hell, England is small enough to fit in side the State of California. So, while there is mass poverty throughout Brazil, that does not prevent Brazil from having one of the largest GDPs on earth. It's land produces so much value and there is so much of that land. Like the United States.

The United Kingdom is a series of countries (like the EU is) and not a single country like England is. England presides as the head of the United Kingdom. Germany and Brazil and the USA are single countries though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

:eyeroll:

Slavery has not driven America forward economically. It probably cost us more than anything. The American West has probably been our biggest propulsion forward in terms of agriculture amd slavery did not drive that. We are hardly the only nation to hve used slavery and it was economically inferior as a system and only benefited the aristocracy. Hence the leaving it behind. It wasn’t because it was morally bankrupt. I wish humans were that good...but it took the invention of more efficient means of gathering to end slavery. Then factor in our steel, shipping, ports, population, and general Lazze fair attitudes to business? That is our true recipe for success.

Evilroddy · Dec 25, 2017

How did America become a global economic superpower and hegemon?

1) Space. Appropriated from the indigenous peoples and from rival colonial powers. This allowed people to move away from power and exploitation rather than having to stay put and confront it through wide-spread violence and destruction of infrastructure.

2) Resources. Appropriated from the indigenous peoples of America and rival colonial powers.

3) Cheap Labour. Human Chattel and later Wage-slavery of immigrant and established populations coupled with honest hard work and fair pay for some labour. This allowed for both sufficient production of food plus goods and services to maintain a stable (albeit unfair) society while also allowing surplus production of cash crops and manufactured goods to allow for the large-scale accumulations of wealth which created the financial system of the USA. This financial system provided the capital and lending necessary to keep the American economy growing when other states economies stalled and collapsed thus allowing for almost continual growth over long periods of time.

4) Rule of Law. A rule of law which protected wealth and accumulated corporate or private capital for the wealthy while allowing for the institutional exploitation and expropriation of wealth from the vast and politically weaker elements of the American population.

5) Geographical Advantage enabling Militarism. A homeland geographically protected by three oceans and a sea which led to the possibility of using its military more in profitable foreign adventures supporting trade and commerce (freedom of the seas and gunboat diplomacy) rather than in desperate and costly defence of the homeland for long periods of time.

6) Ideological Dominance through Marketing. Championing entrepreneurship, mass production and mass marketing to a newly manufactured consumer society in order to sell mass produced goods of uniform but often inferior quality to the widest possible segments of the global population. This later led to the mass marketing of ideas like Americanism, Corporatist Capitalism and Consumerism all around the globe.

7) Luck. Having the good fortune that America's economic rivals routinely destroyed each other's economic infrastructure while America remained largely unscathed.

8) Empire. The creation and enforcement of the Grand Area doctrine which created an invisible commercial empire which enriched America greatly after WWII at the ruinous expense of the rest of the underdeveloped world. This has evolved to dominate the international system and the mechanisms of international relations and dispute resolution.

9) Money. The creation of the Petro-dollar scheme in the early 1970's which allowed for the massive expansion of the US Money Supply and the creation of trillions of dollars of fiat-money for investment and consumption today, out of the debt of tomorrow. It also allowed for the US financial system to create a strangle-hold over the financial mechanisms of global commerce and finance which allowed the US to control or at worst strongly influence the commercial and financial sectors of other allied or rival states.

10) Collusion. Militarism and the three-way marriage of Militarism, Economic Neo-Mercantilism and Political cooperation/collusion with the state which created the post WWII military-industrial-congressional complex. This has since morphed and grown to include surveillance, intelligence, policing and mass media control too.

11) Corruption. Institutional and private corruption for the benefit of US interests (dollar diplomacy) and forceful military enforcement of said corruption abroad.

12) Mass Communications. Leadership in, and at times domination of, the means of mass communication in order to control and mobilise both the US and even global populations to serve American interests against their own interests.

That would be my analysis in a nutshell.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

faithful_servant · Dec 25, 2017

cpwill said:
If you actually care to know, I can't think of a better suggestion than Why Nations Fail.

BLUF: Slavery is not the benefit you think it is; in fact, it is a drag to the creative destruction and innovation that is the hallmark of economic growth and industrialization. The US didn't become the greatest capitalist nation on the planet because of Slavery (West African nations featured far more slavery per capita than we did), but rather in spite of it.

BlackMatters said:
I do thanks for clearing that up.

Back to the slavery theory; how much money capitalists in NYC made selling slave goods. which is why many of them opposed the war, did not want to lose that trade

until they realized how much money they could make selling low quality crap to the government i think..

If your assertion is true then Africa should be the dominant economic powerhouse in the world. They had far more slavery than we did and they also had the same access to resources that we had (with one notable exception, let's see if you can figure out what it was and why it is the real answer to your question [hint: it's already been addressed in this thread]), so why is the US the success that it is and so much of Africa still wallows in poverty?

faithful_servant · Dec 25, 2017

cpwill said:
If you actually care to know, I can't think of a better suggestion than Why Nations Fail.

BLUF: Slavery is not the benefit you think it is; in fact, it is a drag to the creative destruction and innovation that is the hallmark of economic growth and industrialization. The US didn't become the greatest capitalist nation on the planet because of Slavery (West African nations featured far more slavery per capita than we did), but rather in spite of it.

Evilroddy said:
How did America become a global economic superpower and hegemon?

1) Space. Appropriated from the indigenous peoples and from rival colonial powers. This allowed people to move away from power and exploitation rather than having to stay put and confront it through wide-spread violence and destruction of infrastructure.

2) Resources. Appropriated from the indigenous peoples of America and rival colonial powers.

3) Cheap Labour. Human Chattel and later Wage-slavery of immigrant and established populations coupled with honest hard work and fair pay for some labour. This allowed for both sufficient production of food plus goods and services to maintain a stable (albeit unfair) society while also allowing surplus production of cash crops and manufactured goods to allow for the large-scale accumulations of wealth which created the financial system of the USA. This financial system provided the capital and lending necessary to keep the American economy growing when other states economies stalled and collapsed thus allowing for almost continual growth over long periods of time.

4) Rule of Law. A rule of law which protected wealth and accumulated corporate or private capital for the wealthy while allowing for the institutional exploitation and expropriation of wealth from the vast and politically weaker elements of the American population.

5) Geographical Advantage enabling Militarism. A homeland geographically protected by three oceans and a sea which led to the possibility of using its military more in profitable foreign adventures supporting trade and commerce (freedom of the seas and gunboat diplomacy) rather than in desperate and costly defence of the homeland for long periods of time.

6) Ideological Dominance through Marketing. Championing entrepreneurship, mass production and mass marketing to a newly manufactured consumer society in order to sell mass produced goods of uniform but often inferior quality to the widest possible segments of the global population. This later led to the mass marketing of ideas like Americanism, Corporatist Capitalism and Consumerism all around the globe.

7) Luck. Having the good fortune that America's economic rivals routinely destroyed each other's economic infrastructure while America remained largely unscathed.

8) Empire. The creation and enforcement of the Grand Area doctrine which created an invisible commercial empire which enriched America greatly after WWII at the ruinous expense of the rest of the underdeveloped world. This has evolved to dominate the international system and the mechanisms of international relations and dispute resolution.

9) Money. The creation of the Petro-dollar scheme in the early 1970's which allowed for the massive expansion of the US Money Supply and the creation of trillions of dollars of fiat-money for investment and consumption today, out of the debt of tomorrow. It also allowed for the US financial system to create a strangle-hold over the financial mechanisms of global commerce and finance which allowed the US to control or at worst strongly influence the commercial and financial sectors of other allied or rival states.

10) Collusion. Militarism and the three-way marriage of Militarism, Economic Neo-Mercantilism and Political cooperation/collusion with the state which created the post WWII military-industrial-congressional complex. This has since morphed and grown to include surveillance, intelligence, policing and mass media control too.

11) Corruption. Institutional and private corruption for the benefit of US interests (dollar diplomacy) and forceful military enforcement of said corruption abroad.

12) Mass Communications. Leadership in, and at times domination of, the means of mass communication in order to control and mobilise both the US and even global populations to serve American interests against their own interests.

That would be my analysis in a nutshell.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

SO could have saved yourself a lot typing and simply said
"I HATE AMERICA AND EVERYTHING IT'S EVER DONE HAS BEEN EVIL!!!"

Evilroddy · Dec 25, 2017

faithful_servant said:
SO could have saved yourself a lot typing and simply said
"I HATE AMERICA AND EVERYTHING IT'S EVER DONE HAS BEEN EVIL!!!"

No, faithful_servant. This is not American evil. This is human evil and through determination (will and purpose), skill and good fortune the Americans have waxed for the last three hundred years or so. A variation of these points could apply to the recently passed British Empire, to the emerging China, to the Arab world of the 8th to the 12th centuries, to The Neo-Assyrian or Middle Assyrian empires of Mesopotamia, to the various iterations of the Egyptian Kingdoms, to Akkad and Sumerian, verily down through the ages until nomadic hunter-gatherers first settled, herded and farmed. It is not the American condition but the human condition which creates evils like exploitation, militarism, conquest, systematic theft and domination of others by coercive means. America is not innocent but nor is it unique in its pursuit of happiness through empire.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.

ataraxia · Dec 25, 2017

How did America economically become the greatest country?

It happened in the 20th century after most of the rest of the world had completely destroyed itself in the two world wars. America was the only industrialized nation left standing where its major cities had not been completely bombed to smithereens and large portions of its population wiped out That’ll give you a head start. The rest of the world is slowly starting to catch up, though. It’s been about 70 years now since the end of WWII. I figure another 30 years or so and the rest of the world will have caught up, assuming we don’t have another huge war again. If that happens with today’s weapons technology, humanity as a whole is going to be in some big trouble.

”I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
-Albert Einstein

It had nothing to do with slavery.

Mach · Dec 25, 2017

Ever watch the movie Forest Gump? America was that shrimp boat that was spared during the storm that was the world wars.
Also we had a lush land mass that was basically virgin. Ripe for exploitation, and power had not yet consolidated leaving it to rapidly develop.

Learned something about the war of Independence too while reading briefly:
Of these, approximately 6,800 were killed in battle, while at least 17,000 died from disease.

Wow.

Paperview · Dec 25, 2017

Mach said:
Ever watch the movie Forest Gump? America was that shrimp boat that was spared during the storm that was the world wars.
Also we had a lush land mass that was basically virgin. Ripe for exploitation, and power had not yet consolidated leaving it to rapidly develop.

Learned something about the war of Independence too while reading briefly:
Of these, approximately 6,800 were killed in battle, while at least 17,000 died from disease.

Wow.

I like that analogy.

...after that, shrimping was easy.

Fishking · Dec 25, 2017

FastPace said:
Exactly how? A bankrupt nation has no money to become competitive. The industrial North and all its banks remained just fine. I don't know the economic history of the Civil War but I'll roll the dice and guess it was driven by debt to foreign nations just like the Revolutionary War was.

Well, your dice rolling is factually incorrect. The North wasn't just fine and we weren't carrying much debt before the war. We had actually paid down the debt some up until that point.

https://fee.org/articles/the-economic-costs-of-the-civil-war/

"The first and most important point is that the Civil War was expensive. In 1860 the U.S. national debt was $65 million. To put that in perspective, the national debt in 1789, the year George Washington took office, was $77 million. In other words, from 1789 to 1860, the United States spanned the continent, fought two major wars, and began its industrial growth—all the while reducing its national debt.

Four years of civil war changed all that forever. In 1865 the national debt stood at $2.7 billion. Just the annual interest on that debt was more than twice our entire national budget in 1860. In fact, that Civil War debt is almost twice what the federal government spent before 1860.

Blacks remained in the South as agrarian sharecroppers anyways, which for them was essentially slavery (financially) except that their body and person was not owned by another, just their labor. And violence still was used in the South all the way into what... the damned 1960s?

Yes, there was still exploitation of people but that really was no different than anywhere else in the world. Again, there is basically one thing that put the U.S. on top and it has nothing to do with slavery or human exploitation. It was WW1 and WW2, period. Full stop.

Taxman · Dec 25, 2017

BlackMatters said:
Im from Europe and i actually want to know few things here in how America become one of the most powerful countries in the world? I know few things but I some few questions, too if someone can help me explain it better, I will gladely appreciate it

I know tobaccoo was not an example of mercantilism it was an example of capitalism, the British then tried to use mercantilism to profit from the success of tobacco in the colonies.

America would NOT have been anywhere near ready to explode in the Industrial Revolution if not for a more than 200 year head start in part due to slavery. Some estimate that by 1860 slaves had a value of 3.5 BILLION dollars to the US and a big chunk of that was tobacco(and cotton).That allowed the US, in particular the South, to grow MUCH faster than it would have otherwise grown. Slavery happened all over the world and lots of nations used slavery to get ahead economically but there are very strong arguments that no country derived more economic benefit from Slavery than the US did. Tobacco btw did not die out because of the Civil War, it was already massively in decline prior to that, the end ofgrowth of tobacco started with the Revolutionary War. It was the biggest cash crop and then got replaced over time by cotton. Obviously still a very large tobacco industry in the US(unfortunately) but it was already on the decline before the Civil War.

Saying the US economy took off after slavery was abolished is sort of like giving Trumpcredit for a stock market that was up more under his predecessor than it is under him. Things don't go from 0 to 200 in 1 second, the US economy got a more than 200 year headstart due to slavery. It's one of the things we're all aware of but don't talk about because it's frankly a terrible part of our history. What economicpolicy you think led to the US being sodominant?

If the 200 year headstart on the industrial revolution As slavery existed all over the world, throughout history up until the late 18th century when it started to die out. Literally every super power up to then was built on slavery.

Therefore, to say the US had an advantage in the industrial because of slavery is stupid.

The first power to start the abolition of slavery was the UK. Which is also where the industrial revolution started, at around the same time

how do you explain the industrial revolution starting in the UK before it started in the US? and how do you explain it happening in the north without slavery while it did not happen in the south until after the war?

So is it true that the US became the greatest superpower in history on the backs of slavery.??

If the South was more capitalist then how come all the commerce centers were in the North?

This is how it was done and ever since Ike the country has been in a decline.

FastPace · Dec 25, 2017

blackjack50 said:
:eyeroll:

Slavery has not driven America forward economically.

Strawman. Never made that argument in this thread.

And the people I showed in the videos were sharecroppers, not slaves (as in body owned by another). You don't know how to differentiate the two so you have no need of lecturing about anything in this thread.

It probably cost us more than anything.

Oh the martyrs!

The torture based economy of the USA--as this historian and author calls it--fueled the US economy and the industrial north. So, no, the money made from slavery did not just sit in the hands or under the beds of aristocratic Southern slave owners. Nor did the cotton picked merely stay in the towns of the South.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (w/ Edward E. Baptist)

The American West has probably been our biggest propulsion forward in terms of agriculture amd slavery did not drive that.

The American West was not driving cotton crops that were being sold all over Europe.

We are hardly the only nation to hve used slavery and it was economically inferior as a system and only benefited the aristocracy.

As I said in my earlier posts in this thread the United States industrialized. Did you read my post about the lecture and graph in my Developmental Economics course and how industrial countries economies grew exponentially? Only and handful of countries on earth embraced industrialization. Latin America essentially did not. Albeit, the City of Sao Paulo was a very industrialized city in the late 1800s but it was more an exception. Agrarian societies like Latin America sold their raw resources (not finished goods) to industrial countries who turned those raw goods into finished products. Industrial societies like the USA could take its raw resources and turn them into finished products and export them overseas, adding value as economists would say, to those raw materials.

But slavery itself did not only benefit a Southern aristocracy. That's not even how the so-called "circular flow" of an economy works. The material and money produced in the South added to the United States GDP.

Hence the leaving it behind. It wasn’t because it was morally bankrupt. I wish humans were that good...but it took the invention of more efficient means of gathering to end slavery.

The United States did not simply "leave" slavery behind. Brazil you might say did because Brazil never fought a Civil War to end slavery.

Slavery was in fact a moral issue for many in the United States. Like most German-Americans in Wisconsin who almost all where abolitionist. Those sympathies that is. Or what... the North fought the war against the South so that it could mechanize the Southern slave crops and pay white field workers a middle-class wage in the late 1880s?

Then factor in our steel, shipping, ports, population, and general Lazze fair attitudes to business? That is our true recipe for success.

Wait... what the hell does any of that have to do with picking cotton and tobacco and rice? Black-American slaves were mainly employee in steel and shipping? The US Civil War was fought to free black slaves toiling in steel production and working in the ports and on ships, that's what the US Civil War was fought over?

Riddle me how my Black-American grandfather was toiling in poverty in Mississippi as a sharecropper--before he came up North to Milwaukee and worked in the factories--if the North came to bring blessed productivity to Southern agricultural fields by paying black labor so damn much money to work?

Like this woman... who was a sharecropper:

FastPace · Dec 25, 2017

What I said, and emphasis in bold:

Exactly how? A bankrupt nation has no money to become competitive. The industrial North and all its banks remained just fine. I don't know the economic history of the Civil War but I'll roll the dice and guess it was driven by debt to foreign nations just like the Revolutionary War was.

Fishking said:
Well, your dice rolling is factually incorrect.

Your comment makes no sense whatsoever in relation to what I said. I claimed 2 things:

(A) That I will make the guess the Civil War was driven by debt [to foreign nations].

(B) That the Revolutionary War was financed by debt to foreign nations.

The North wasn't just fine and we weren't carrying much debt before the war. We had actually paid down the debt some up until that point.

https://fee.org/articles/the-economic-costs-of-the-civil-war/

"The first and most important point is that the Civil War was expensive. In 1860 the U.S. national debt was $65 million. To put that in perspective, the national debt in 1789, the year George Washington took office, was $77 million. In other words, from 1789 to 1860, the United States spanned the continent, fought two major wars, and began its industrial growth—all the while reducing its national debt.

Four years of civil war changed all that forever. In 1865 the national debt stood at $2.7 billion. Just the annual interest on that debt was more than twice our entire national budget in 1860. In fact, that Civil War debt is almost twice what the federal government spent before 1860.

Absolutely did not contradict my claims. In fact part of it (post Civil War part) actually provided evidence for what I said.

The Revolutionary War I know was financed by debit to foreign nations. How do I know? Because I read a book about Alexander Hamilton and his great vision for and guidance of the US economy (something Thomas Jefferson did not have as his vision was one a country of small, literate farmers. Jefferson was opposed to both industrialization of the country and banking as well as establishing a Central Bank--all those things were promoted by Alexander Hamilton). After the Revolutionary War the USA war near approaching bankruptcy, but Alexander Hamilton made it his mission that the US Government would pay off our debit to foreign nations, and he organized our economy with partnership from the banks to do just that.

One could argue Black-American slaves helped fuel that repaying of our national debt to foreign countries.

Then you bring up this dumb attempted counter about how the USA was massively in debt after the Civil War (Why? no black slaves to help pay it off like post Revolutionary War times did when the USA still had slavery? Exactly what was your point. It sure as hell did not disprove my guess that the US incurred debt during the Civil War [by taking loans from other countries]).

Yes, there was still exploitation of people but that really was no different than anywhere else in the world. Again, there is basically one thing that put the U.S. on top and it has nothing to do with slavery or human exploitation. It was WW1 and WW2, period. Full stop.

No, it was not only that. It was the industrial Revolution in the USA as well. And WWII. Things I already mentioned in earlier posts.

You and others are doing your wicked best to diminish the productive output of slaves in the agricultural fields, as well as diminish the contribution of their labor as it resulted in multiplying the money supply in the United States all the way into the industrial factories of the North.

You all are trying to throw glory upon your white ancestors and to diminish the ancestors of Black-Americans in this country. I've been to college enough and taken enough courses economics, history of labor, financing and banking to know exactly what you all are doing. Yes, my German-American ancestors in Wisconsin brought craftsmanship and work ethic to the United States that improved the United States. But my Black-American ancestors that toiled in the agricultural fields of the South worked equally impressively and their labor helped build the wealth of this country too. What ultimately differentiated the United States economically from Colombia would be that the United States embraced industrialization. They both had black slaves. But only one fully embraced industrialization.

(In terms of land, the USA is one of the most resource rich on the planet too, but much of that would not get exploited until after the Civil War. It took to the 20th century before Americans discovered oil seeping onto the soil in the United States could have any use, any productive use.)

Ahlevah · Dec 25, 2017

Taxman said:
This is how it was done and ever since Ike the country has been in a decline.

After WWII when we were the only game in town and other countries demanded our goods in order to rebuild their economies, we could do that. The problem is today we're competing for capital with every other country on the planet. When companies do expand, they'd rather do it in a country without tax rates that are worse than what they could get from a protection racket.

Fishking · Dec 25, 2017

FastPace said:
You and others are doing your wicked best to diminish the productive output of slaves in the agricultural fields, as well as diminish the contribution of their labor as it resulted in multiplying the money supply in the United States all the way into the industrial factories of the North.

Sorry, but you're just going to continue to be willfully ignorant and wrong. Other countries were also industrialized. There was nothing unique about the industrial revolution in the U.S., unless you count not being blown up in a world war as unique. All the wealth that the U.S. gained from slavery was wiped out, as I factually proved.

And what do we see now? People have rebuilt since the World Wars, and had babies to replace the dead. Further, other countries that weren't developed during that time have now become so. Now there is competition and you see things like the EU zone now being a bigger economy than the US.

But hey...if this is the incorrect hill you want to die on, far be it from me to stop you.

How did America economically become the greatest Country?

Fishking

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