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How did America economically become the greatest Country?

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.




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




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.




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?



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:




Good god. Talk about word vomit. The ENTIRE point of my statement is that the United States did not become an economic powerhouse on the backs of slaves. Attempting to claim that is INSANE. Why? Because we were not the premier economy until after slaves were gone. And our industries that truly fueled our economic expansion and dominance in the globe were NOT based on slave labor. Period. There is no debating that. Steel, coal, shipping, and major agricultural growth as we expanded west. Coal and rapid industrialization paved the way for our truly dominating economic structure. And as stated...our policies economically as well.

Again. Trying to claim our economy is based on slaves ignores the FACT that the slavery market was abolished before the growth of our economy to a truly significant global scale. It also ignores the plunging market of cotton post war...the one product that was truly based on slave labor that did have some global strength. Our economy is founded on industry and then agriculture. And not slave based ag. Industrial agriculture.
 
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?

Three things aided the US to achieve it's mightiness:

1. Easily removable native population thanks to their inability to overcome disease
2. Vast wilderness chock full of easily exploitable resources: lumber, fur, fossil fuels, etc.
3. Unique population/gene pool, in that most people here descend from those who had the initiative to migrate from somewhere else
 
I don't recall "economic powerhouse" used much during the 1930s. We were too poor to pay attention.

Then, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Truth be known, it was the war machine that brought us prosperity. War debt is counted in casualties. The rest is verifiable deficit.
 
I don't recall "economic powerhouse" used much during the 1930s. We were too poor to pay attention.

Then, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Truth be known, it was the war machine that brought us prosperity. War debt is counted in casualties. The rest is verifiable deficit.

Our depression wasn't really that bad. 25% unemployment meant that 75% of the people still had jobs. Think about that for a minute.
 
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.,

Other who? I took a 300 level developmental economics course in which the professor in lectured showed the exponential economic growth of ALL industrialized countries in contrast to the non-industrialized countries in the late 1800s and early 1990s like those of Latin America. The one that is ignorant is you.

Colombia and the USA both had black slaves from the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. The difference is the USA industrialized and Colombia did not. You said other countries had slavery (insinuating black slaves from the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, and insinuating Latin America and the Caribbean) and so I was poiunting out that yes indeed other countries like Colombia and Brazil did have slavery but the USA industrialized.

Prior to industrialization the USA was on par with Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The one who is ignorant--and willfully so--is you.


unless you count not being blown up in a world war as unique.

World War II took place in the 1940s. The Industrial Revolution began in the 1800s.


All the wealth that the U.S. gained from slavery was wiped out, as I factually proved.

The USA retained its industrial cities. What are resources: land (including wood, gold, etc.), labor (population size as well as skill level of workforce), and capital (factories, tools, machines etc.)

Just as WWII did not wipe out US industrial cities, the Civil War did not wipe out Northern Industrial cities. The US South was largely agrarian based and in fact all the way into what... 1960 the most industrialized large city of the South was probably Birmingham, Alabama (and it was a union town and had the most notorious KKK chapter in the country during the 1960s too).

So, the debt incurred by the US Civil War was due to civil war, and not from black Southern slaves being unproductive agricultural workers (which is the stupid s__ you insinuated). But even with the increased national debt, the many industrial towns of the North having their factories would allow for a productive workforce in terms of finished goods, that is raw resources that have value added to them (e.g., raw wood turned into a desk, cotton turned into shirts etc.).

After the Revolutionary War the USA put up protective tariffs against British goods, so that the USA could building up its own factories and produce its own goods and economy that could one day compete with Great Britain. You see, prior to the Revolutionary War England used its colonies like those of the USA to ship raw resources to England (and England set a limit on the prices as well as forbade the colonies from selling their goods to certain rival countries of England) and England would add value to those raw goods by turning them into things in and then exporting them back to its colonies like the USA to be sold to the colonists.

Likewise, eventually the USA treated Latin America in a similar fashion ("neo-colonialism" the term is), well into the late 20th century.
 
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.

The United States spent money rebuilding Europe and Japan after WWII in part, so it is I was taught in university, so the USA could have consumers over there to buy the goods the USA wanted to export globally, now that after WWII it found itself having an export monopoly.

I love how white Americans like to claim, "The problem with Black-America is that they don't value education and won't go to university to learn," but once a ethnic Black-American as myself does and correct some of half truths, or some totally false things, that some white person like you states then all of a sudden our education and semesters spent studying and taking exams are meaningless and we are dumb. If I were "willfully ignorant" as a biology major I would never have taken it upon myself to take courses like a history of labor in the USA and developmental economics which were not prerequisite for my major. I took them out of interest and for intellectual growth.

And you? What did you do... read a pro-Southern sympathy revisionist history book? And some how you think I'm a ignorant black that never knew nothing and has never wanted to know anything, whereas you think of yourself as some half a__ Albert Einstein, eh?

Now, into the 1970s it is claimed by some that corporate America colluded to export American jobs abroad under the proposition: For corporate profits rates to keep increasing the average American family *must* take a decline in their lifestyle (jobs and wages it is meant).



Addendum:



Nota bene, this Chinese businessman (I think billionaire) at roughly the 0:55 mark of the video says about 30 years (probably circa 1987) ago he heard America had this great plan: to outsource our manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico and so on. He apparently heard that in China. And that would seem to indicate the shipping of jobs away from the USA (manufacturing ones at least) was planned, orchestrate, not accidental.
 
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Good god. Talk about word vomit. The ENTIRE point of my statement is that the United States did not become an economic powerhouse on the backs of slaves. Attempting to claim that is INSANE. Why? Because we were not the premier economy until after slaves were gone. And our industries that truly fueled our economic expansion and dominance in the globe were NOT based on slave labor. Period. There is no debating that. Steel, coal, shipping, and major agricultural growth as we expanded west. Coal and rapid industrialization paved the way for our truly dominating economic structure. And as stated...our policies economically as well.

No, there is no "period" to it, as slave labor in the agricultural fields was a critical component to the American GDP. That's why America used slavery. As this scholar of this book I have already read states and provides the data for.

Slavery is not the only reason and explanation for why the USA became a superpower, but the early economic growth of the USA can not be divorced from slavery and that slave labor dismissed.



The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Published on Oct 16, 2014

Cornell University Professor Edward E. Baptist author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism...


Again. Trying to claim our economy is based on slaves ignores the FACT that the slavery market was abolished before the growth of our economy to a truly significant global scale. It also ignores the plunging market of cotton post war...the one product that was truly based on slave labor that did have some global strength. Our economy is founded on industry and then agriculture. And not slave based ag. Industrial agriculture.

What the hell are you talking about other than spewing out your word vomit of a strawman?

My post #33:

https://www.debatepolitics.com/religion-and-politics/304580-did-america-economically-become-greatest-country-4.html#post1067976166

My first two paragraphs in that post #33:

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.

Bold and underlined my emphasis here (in this post). I made a mistake placing that "and" in between solely and slavery.

Where the hell did I say or insinuate the US ever got to where it is today just on slavery alone? The scholar of that book calls, correctly so, the period of America history with slaver a torture based economy. That's exactly what is was, precisely what it was. I don't give a damn if there were free whites working (and those free white kids were tied to poles in US factories and whipped across their backs if caught falling asleep, the adult worker in contrast the bosses simply deducted from their paychecks as punishment).


In my post #34 I don't say or insinuate slavery is the only means by which the USA would rise to become a superpower: https://www.debatepolitics.com/religion-and-politics/304580-did-america-economically-become-greatest-country-4.html#post1067976187

Slave labor significantly contributed to the economic rise of the United States. And historically many powerful countries used slave--inexpensive--labor to build their nations up. The point is black slave labor has as much right to esteem in the history of US labor as white steel workers out east (like the former Bethlehem Steel) or German-American craftsmen that labored in Milwaukee.
 
I don't recall "economic powerhouse" used much during the 1930s. We were too poor to pay attention.

Then, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Truth be known, it was the war machine that brought us prosperity. War debt is counted in casualties. The rest is verifiable deficit.

I agree that it was the two world wars, especially the second one, that brought us prosperity and international superiority. But it did so in a very carefully balanced way. It was just lucky. The situation was just right: enough war to stimulate and super-rev the economy, but unlike the rest of the industrialized world, not enough to destroy its entire infrastructure and wipe out large portions of the population. I guess that's a very lucky and contingent combination of factors coming together. So by the end of the war, the rest of the world lay in smoking ruins, while the US had its infrastructure completely intact, and well-oiled and souped up and ready to go as the next super power.

Plus, we got all the best German scientists at the end too (Einstein, Oppenheimer, Braun, etc...). Better than the ones the Russians ended up with. So just a very lucky and happy coming-together of many contingent factors.

I agree all this had nothing to do with our history of slavery.
 
No, there is no "period" to it, as slave labor in the agricultural fields was a critical component to the American GDP. That's why America used slavery. As this scholar of this book I have already read states and provides the data for.

Slavery is not the only reason and explanation for why the USA became a superpower, but the early economic growth of the USA can not be divorced from slavery and that slave labor dismissed.








What the hell are you talking about other than spewing out your word vomit of a strawman?

My post #33:

https://www.debatepolitics.com/religion-and-politics/304580-did-america-economically-become-greatest-country-4.html#post1067976166

My first two paragraphs in that post #33:



Bold and underlined my emphasis here (in this post). I made a mistake placing that "and" in between solely and slavery.

Where the hell did I say or insinuate the US ever got to where it is today just on slavery alone? The scholar of that book calls, correctly so, the period of America history with slaver a torture based economy. That's exactly what is was, precisely what it was. I don't give a damn if there were free whites working (and those free white kids were tied to poles in US factories and whipped across their backs if caught falling asleep, the adult worker in contrast the bosses simply deducted from their paychecks as punishment).


In my post #34 I don't say or insinuate slavery is the only means by which the USA would rise to become a superpower: https://www.debatepolitics.com/religion-and-politics/304580-did-america-economically-become-greatest-country-4.html#post1067976187

Slave labor significantly contributed to the economic rise of the United States. And historically many powerful countries used slave--inexpensive--labor to build their nations up. The point is black slave labor has as much right to esteem in the history of US labor as white steel workers out east (like the former Bethlehem Steel) or German-American craftsmen that labored in Milwaukee.


England voluntarily gave up slave labor long before us. They could afford to because they were ahead at the time in terms of industrialization, and no longer needed the slave labor. And up until WWI and even in the inter-war period, they were a more prominent international power.

Ditto for Germany. And slave labor was never even an issue for them.

It was about industrialization, not slave labor. Industrialization, as a part of the consequences of the broader scientific and technological revolution which started back in the 17th century, was the real game changer in human societies. Whoever is ahead on that curve rules the world. I think in the future, this massive revolution in human history will be seen as a pivotal event comparable to the discovery of fire, or iron, or the rise of civilization itself.
 
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The United States spent money rebuilding Europe and Japan after WWII in part, so it is I was taught in university, so the USA could have consumers over there to buy the goods the USA wanted to export globally, now that after WWII it found itself having an export monopoly.

Right...they had to be rebuilt

I love how white Americans like to claim, "The problem with Black-America is that they don't value education and won't go to university to learn," but once a ethnic Black-American as myself does and correct some of half truths, or some totally false things, that some white person like you states then all of a sudden our education and semesters spent studying and taking exams are meaningless and we are dumb. If I were "willfully ignorant" as a biology major I would never have taken it upon myself to take courses like a history of labor in the USA and developmental economics which were not prerequisite for my major. I took them out of interest and for intellectual growth.

And you? What did you do... read a pro-Southern sympathy revisionist history book? And some how you think I'm a ignorant black that never knew nothing and has never wanted to know anything, whereas you think of yourself as some half a__ Albert Einstein, eh?

Now, into the 1970s it is claimed by some that corporate America colluded to export American jobs abroad under the proposition: For corporate profits rates to keep increasing the average American family *must* take a decline in their lifestyle (jobs and wages it is meant).

I didn't know what color you were. I just disagreed with you. That you are artificially injecting that into the conversation, as a crutch to prop up your failing position is your choice, not mine. That aside, I'm glad you got an education and whether some random person on the internet agrees with you or not doesn't mean you're not benefiting from your education. Employers like to see that piece of paper that says you're supposed to know something, whether it is true or not.
 
Nota bene, this Chinese businessman (I think billionaire) at roughly the 0:55 mark of the video says about 30 years (probably circa 1987) ago he heard America had this great plan: to outsource our manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico and so on. He apparently heard that in China. And that would seem to indicate the shipping of jobs away from the USA (manufacturing ones at least) was planned, orchestrate, not accidental.

I don't think it was planning and collusion as much as it was just the way the free market was going. Those who saw it coming early on just saw the writing on the wall created by the large, impersonal economic forces and trends at play, rather than learning of any master plan orchestrated and forced through by any all-powerful group or entity. It's like a weatherman who looks at the pressure, the wind pattern, and humidity, and knows it's going to rain. Those who are not at good at reading and interpreting and understanding those things are more likely to think the rain was deliberately sent down by the gods or something. No. Just large, impersonal forces at play. You just gotta be smart and educated enough to see them and know what they will mean.
 
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Other who? I took a 300 level developmental economics course in which the professor in lectured showed the exponential economic growth of ALL industrialized countries in contrast to the non-industrialized countries in the late 1800s and early 1990s like those of Latin America. The one that is ignorant is you.

Colombia and the USA both had black slaves from the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. The difference is the USA industrialized and Colombia did not. You said other countries had slavery (insinuating black slaves from the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, and insinuating Latin America and the Caribbean) and so I was poiunting out that yes indeed other countries like Colombia and Brazil did have slavery but the USA industrialized.

Prior to industrialization the USA was on par with Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The one who is ignorant--and willfully so--is you.

No, there was no insinuation regarding the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. That was your own condition that you inserted in yourself, a strawman. Slaves were used inside the UK, obviously it wasn't "Trans Atlantic" because *gasp* they are on the same side of the Atlantic Ocean! WHoooaaaa! Mind blown! Further, if you want to look at exploitation of blacks and other people, the UK beats the US hands down. They had colonies all over the globe, to include South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, ect. ect.

World War II took place in the 1940s. The Industrial Revolution began in the 1800s.

No, the Industrial Revolution started in the 1700s, and it didn't start in America. Also, WWI started in 1914. But, again, there were many industrialized nations. The US was not the global powerhouse that it is today during the Industrial Revolution. They were just emerging as one of many world powers by the 1900s. The transference of wealth and power to the US happened, in significant part, during WWI. Also, the industrialized nations suffered greatly from that war and the US remained untouched. It was WW1 that saw the first dynamic shift in the fortunes of the US.

The USA retained its industrial cities. What are resources: land (including wood, gold, etc.), labor (population size as well as skill level of workforce), and capital (factories, tools, machines etc.)

Just as WWII did not wipe out US industrial cities, the Civil War did not wipe out Northern Industrial cities. The US South was largely agrarian based and in fact all the way into what... 1960 the most industrialized large city of the South was probably Birmingham, Alabama (and it was a union town and had the most notorious KKK chapter in the country during the 1960s too).

I already provided you the information showing that the capital that the US had from slavery by the war. The US was billions of dollars in debt.

So, the debt incurred by the US Civil War was due to civil war, and not from black Southern slaves being unproductive agricultural workers (which is the stupid s__ you insinuated). But even with the increased national debt, the many industrial towns of the North having their factories would allow for a productive workforce in terms of finished goods, that is raw resources that have value added to them (e.g., raw wood turned into a desk, cotton turned into shirts etc.).

I never insinuated that. WTF are you talking about?! I said nothing slaves being unproductive agricultural workers. I stated exactly what you said before that, that the war wiped out the wealth from slavery. Gone, by billions of dollars. How about you pull your head out of your backside and stop looking for ways to play the race card that doesn't exist.

War on your own territory is expensive and damaging and nothing does that more than a civil war. Everyone that dies is from your own population. Everything that is damaged is your own property. This is why WW1 and WW2 where so advantageous for the US and how the US got set up as the sole super power. Everyone else that was industrialized had their stuff blown up and had generations of working aged males killed.

Stop peddling your pathetic racial crap and make a real point, instead of endless strawmen that wasn't even close to implied.
 
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