Our system of Government - the first TRULY limited government in history - brought on the greatest explosion in technology and prosperity that the world has ever seen!Having a passing interest in history, I think that I should tell a story, specifically the story of the industrial revolution. There has been a lot of talk about "Pax Americana" and the prosperity brought on by free market principles. This is true, however if you look at the prosperity of Hong Kong from 1950 to 1997 you'll find that they shot up faster than we ever did, and so the observational evidence starts to chip away at the idea that our government has much to do with prosperity and technology.
But, once upon a time when our nation was young, having just won its independence...
The first known record of interchangeable parts was when Eli Whitney of the Cotton Gin fame and Simeon North competed for a contract to deliver standardized muskets to the US Government. That may have been the "birth" of the industrial revolution, but the true story of machining and manufacturing then went to Europe.
In Great Britain and Germany the machinists and tradesmen honed their craft. Ever wonder why the threads on a Mauser rifle action are measured in "threads per inch" instead of "threads per centimeter"? It is because the best machining equipment in the world at that time came from Great Britain.
Then came a World War, the Great Depression, then World War part 2. Remember that up until this time the center of innovation and prosperity wasn't the United States, machining excellence and scientific research was in Europe. There is a very good reason for John Moses Browning's intimate relationship with Fabrique National in Belgium. When the Nazi's captured Belgium they found the High Power pistol design so acceptable they just continued to have FN factories crank them out for use by the Wehrmacht.
After WWII we split Europe with the Russians, we grabbed hold of German scientists and so did they, and then we spent a lot of money trying to develop technology so we could clobber the Russians in World War part 3. But you don't see the "greatest explosion in technology and prosperity that the world has ever seen" until we bring back the spoils of war. Even our Interstate Highway system is a borrowed idea.
And what is the role of government in all of this? At best a financier of research. Sure the space program gave us SuperGlue and pressurized gel pens, but it was a woman named Stephanie Kwolack doing research at Dupont who invented Kevlar. The US government helped fund the mapping of the human genome, however the fruit from that endeavor still remains mostly in the future.
History is the story of how the world as we know it came to be. But you have be very careful in proscribing a "cause/effect" relationship to a system of government and progress. After all, the dominance of Japanese and German research in the last few decades leads me to believe that the "explosion in technology" is not centered in the United States anymore. We are graduating less than half of the scientists and engineers that Germany puts out every year on a statistical basis.
Sweden is a prosperous Socialist country, Cuba is a poor Communist country, Saudi Arabia is a prosperous Monarchy, Israel is a prosperous Democracy. Saying that our method of government is the direct cause of the technological progress made after WWII is a massive oversimplification (as our chief competitors in the technology department, Great Britain and Germany, were rebuilding well into the late 1950s from the war damage). American factories undamaged by bombs were able to put a lot of returning veterans to work (and when those Japanese and German factories got back on line again, who boy did they eat our lunch!) and American Universities and Corporations were able to take advantage of refugee scientists and engineers. I would counter the Dedicated_Dad's statement that it was geography and not limited government that produced the era of relative prosperity from 1950 to 2000 (with some notable exceptions such as 1972 to 1984).
In reality the two biggest "technological leaps forward" were the integrated circuit (which took a German initial patent, American engineering, and Italian physicist to turn into a CPU ) and the internet (we should remember that html was developed at CERN) which had a lot less government support than most people think. And neither invention can be laid at the feet of "limited government" as a success.
This world is more interconnected than we know. We must remember that as America grew prosperous so did the rest of the world, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
6 comments:
Sweden has a large and thriving private sector. They do have a hell of a big public sector, but "socialist" isn't the term. They're a mixed economy. IMHO their advantages over us have to do with a homogeneous population of peaceful, honest people who work hard (like we used to have, modulo the "peaceful"). But I've been wrong before.
As for Hong Kong developing faster than the US, their economic policies were famously -- even proverbially -- laissez-faire during the period when their growth really took off, and remained so for long after. Far more laissez-faire than we've ever been. Oh, and they also had a relatively homogeneous population of peaceful and reasonably honest people who worked really, really hard.
IIRC, some libertarian did a study a few years back, and to his surprise found (and to his credit, published) that stable and honest government -- minimal regime hazard and minimal cronyism -- correlated better with economic development than freedom did.
"stable and honest government -- minimal regime hazard and minimal cronyism --"
Sounds like freedom to me.
Matthew Walker,
I thank you for your points, I am pretty sure that Sweden is a socialist state. Much more business friendly after the Socialist party got the boot in 1991, but the reforms were pro business, not anti-Socialist.
There is a reason that India and China move forward faster than Brazil and Russia, and that is corruption is a tad less in those countries. Although there are significant legal hurdles to overcome in India, and China is no exception.
And do let's remember that when German and Japanese factories were "eating our lunch" they were both almost wholly unburdened -nay, specifically proscribed - with taking any responsibility for any sort of actual armed forces worthy of the name, or the defense expenditures necessary to create and maintain them, for decades. Seems that after 1945, seeing German and Japanese troops marching 8 abreast through their home capitol streets didn't fill a lot of their neighbors with warm fuzzy thoughts.
Consequently, WE spent a good bit of national treasure doing that work for ourselves and them, and NATO, and on and on. Money which was sucked directly from the coffers of our "inferior" industrial base.
BTW, the taxation rate in balmy Sweden is somewhere north of a confiscatory 70%.
If that level of buttrape of the citizenry is going to pass for "free", or even "mixed", I'll take the unadulterated poison, thanks all the same.
-Aesop
Aesop, you should really watch the TED talk I linked to, it shows more than just Germany and Japan in terms of economic growth. Countries like Bangladesh which had their own revolution managed to get going rather quickly with very little influence from the US (apart from being a major consumer).
China is moving forward because its people have a nationalistic fervor, whipped up by using a mix of carefully concocted propaganda and past grievances. While the country has yet to make any technological leap, the country's middle class is already larger than the entire population of the US and they are increasingly supplanting the western world.
The National Socialist Party of Germany united the people into a similar collective mindset. The Gestapo was harsh to businesses (except those industrialists who supported Adolf Hitler) and yet Germany produced the first cruise missile, the first jet engine, the first sub-orbital spaceflight (The V2 Rocket), the first light amplification and the first infrared technology.
The United States was in the throes of political upheaval during the Great Depression, then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Corporations paid as much as 90% of their income in War Profits taxes, and yet the first binary computer (ENIAC), nuclear weapons, radar, synthetic rubber and other things were produced.
While it may look as if socialistic economies produce the best innovation, it is far from the truth: Before the Nazis invaded Josef Stalin ran his socialist country into the ground by killing experienced Russian officers, committing genocide upon farmers and imprisoning innovators. When Nazis invaded he had to appeal to nationalism (Mother Russia). Russia produced the T34 (one of two progenitors to the Main Battle Tank: the other was the Panther), the IL2 Sturmovik (the progenitor to today's ground attack planes) and after the war, produced the AK-47, the BMP (the world's first infantry fighting vehicle), the Lunakhod (the progenitor to every unmanned vehicle in use today) and other things.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and if a people believe in their own existence enough, it does not matter how high the taxes are or what the political system is. Israel is socialistic, but being under constant attack and memories of the Holocaust motivates the Jews.
Right now, the United States is being run by the international socialists who have brainwashed an entire generation of people to believe that the United States is a cancer upon the world. With a widespread belief that we are not necessary, no one (except those old enough to remember a better United States) is going to step forward and innovate.
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