The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when facing GIs in WW2.
Of course, with free markets and prosperity, the Germans and Japanese have since caught up.
(In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.)
> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.
The US nationalized many industries during WWII.
From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1]
"In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. Bondholders and stockholders were compensated, and railroads were returned to private ownership in 1920, after the war ended.
During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain."
"the individual most closely involved with this effort, recounts the unique story of Ohly and his compatriots who were charged with the mission of guaranteeing that private companies sustained the vital war production of weapons, munitions, and other materiel needed by America's fighting men and the Allies to achieve victory overseas"
Rather, it was having access to 1) continent-wide natural resources and 2) no combat theatre domestically which would have disrupted manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, not to mention civilian life and morale.
I should point out that the industrial bit of the USSR was the bit the Germans invaded first. The Soviets had to move their entire industrial heartland a thousand or so miles east out of harm's way and rebuild it before they could start producing stuff.
When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.
Which strongly suggests that the real problem is ideological polemics, which makes sense when you think about it.
The USA didn't stick to ideological capitalism, and implemented many "socialist" policies: welfare systems, public works projects, labour protections, public infrastructure, etc. etc.
The USSR did stick to ideological communism as they defined it. Markets weren't utilized at all. Freedom of thought was suppressed. Political purges were executed.
In the USA, something similar was tried with the "red scare", but thankfully plurality won out, and some of those "abhorrent" socialist policies became mainstays in "great capitalist America" as part of the New Deal, which is what saved the USA from its domestic communist movement.
Over the last few decades though, the USA seems to have forgotten this. Forgotten that what saved the USA was not rigid adherence to some pre-existing quasi-religious ideological/spiritual polemic (which both capitalism and communism are), but the willingness to implement and incorporate a wide basket of ideas as they were appropriate.
Also it's worth noting that the US has a bunch of nationalised/government controlled services that are privatised in the UK and other parts of Europe, including:
- Airports and airport security
- Postal service (USPS)
- Train operators (Amtrak)
- Insurance (FCIC, FEMA)
- Various municipal utilities and the TVA
- Various credit/financial/banking institutions
In the UK, we have privatised airports, mail, energy, telephony, water, train operators (though this is sort of changing), and don't have equivalents for many of the government owned finance organisations that the US has.
Additionally, many of the private industries in the US are far from free market. The UK's private healthcare industry is arguably more free market than the US's private healthcare industry, although has to compete with the NHS.
This isn't a criticism, just to remark that the US certainly isn't afraid of nationalisation and government owned services.
The US indeed has a very unfree health care system, and that is the source of the bulk of the problems with it, such as incredible costs.
It's not a coincidence that the industries heavily distorted by the government in the US are the costliest - health care and education. Ironically, this interference was all aimed at reducing cost.
The book you cite doesn't seem to support your argument.
Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry.
Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as being against capitalism and free markets; they want to replace individuals "voting with their wallet" by collectively taking control from management via committees of (frequently communist leaning or outright communist) representatives of the workers.
Thirdly, it says quite clearly that as late as 1943 the War Department had done so few of these seizures that it amounted to "barely a dozen". By the end of the war they had seized around 60. That's a drop in the ocean of the US economy, which is why it's not well known.
So this example doesn't really seem to argue against the notion that the US won because of free market capitalism. The only places where they had to step in and become authoritarian (very briefly) were places where capitalism was breaking down thanks to communist agitation.
To be fair, Roosevelt in his 1945 State of the Union Address advocated for imposing forced labor on American civilians. Fortunately, that went nowhere.
The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
You won't get very far turning up to the US with nothing but a suitcase today. If you don't have significant assets or a confirmed job offer you'll be turned around and sent back to where you came from, and sometimes that'll happen even if you do have those things. Holding on to an outdated view of what America is like is ... unhelpful.
Have you been following the news on what's been happening at the southern border? 100,000 people a month coming through, some of them throwing their children over the wall to get here.
One of the reasons Mexico is poor is because it had a disproportionately strong elite class dedicated to maintaining huge disparities in wealth through monopolies and more or less obvious slave labour.
When the industrial revolution rolled through town Mexico couldn't take advantage of it. Back then the US used to welcome anyone from anywhere with ambition and an interesting idea.
China is also seeing large numbers of people rising from abject poverty to a "western" more affluent lifestyle. I don't think that this is a terribly good yardstick for fairness and freedom in a society.
If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.
Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.
Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.
> If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.
For suitable definitions of communism, a stock market is a good way to get the means of production into the hands of the workers: they can buy stocks and share ownership of the company they work for.
I don't claim to be an expert in politology, but what I remember from school seems to indicate that the common ownership of the means of production is the core idea of communism. I don't understand how a stock market is antithetical to that. As I see it, common ownership of the means of production can be achieved both with and without a stock market. Could you maybe elaborate your standpoint?
A stock market allows people to acquire ownership in companies, but it will be highly unequal: some of them will have more, some will have less, some will have none. That unequal ownership will generate correspondingly unequal rewards.
No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politically connected.
In the past, a lot of (non-slave) people immigrated to the USA precisely because they were impoverished -- for example, Irish fleeing the Great Famine, among many others.
> "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
Whether those words are as appropriate today may be another matter, of course.
I understand this example to be of historical note because it was exceptional. Many people came over for the promise of farmland or gold or something that they could capitalise on.
They came because they were poor. For a fictionalized account of Swedish immigrants, see Moberg's novel "The Emigrants". You might dismiss it as fiction, but the preface writes:
"To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Smaland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had
sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth Century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life
aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies."
I'm curious if that's a figure for the number who enter and remain long-term, or does it include those who are quickly detained and expelled? I.e. does the Mexican border account for a million-plus annual increase in overall US population?
1. The USSR had (and has) much more resources per population. Japan achieved great wealth with insignificant natural resources.
2. Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. The money was to be made by cramming poor people in below decks. In colonial times, America was populated mostly by people escaping prosecution, indentured servants, sons who weren't first born and were not going to inherit anything, teens whose parents could not support them, etc. The Chinese and Japanese people came to escape poverty.
Furthermore, South America was and is rich in resources, but it remains poor. Nothing like the US happened there.
> Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing.
Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
> Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do.
"The median income of foreign-born households in 2016 was $53,200, compared to U.S. born resident’s median household income of $58,000."
> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.
> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.
> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.
You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.
Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.
Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference.
They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.
When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.
Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.
During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.
Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.
Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.
> too expensive for poor people to typically consider.
Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.
Besides, have you seen those pictures of immigrants going through Ellis Island clutching their battered suitcases? Do they look like rich people to you?
> That seems like middle class people to me.
Yup. Came poor and moved up to middle class.
BTW, I am properly amused by your theory that the US became a superpower via rich people immigrating and transferring their money to the US. That doesn't even pass the sniff test.
> Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.
Where? Poor people get second-hand iPhones, or subscribe to plans that bill you in small installments over a few years. And even those who manage to save up and buy a new one - in a modern civilization, a smartphone is a basic necessity, right there after food and shelter.
Seems like just below middle income, which is typically deep in the working class and pretty far from the petit bourgeoisie, the balance-of-capital-and-labor-dependence middle class between thr working and capitalist classes.
That's a fine definition, but puts middle class in at least the top 10%, if not comfortably the top 1%, by wealth and income.
My question was whether we have different definitions of poor - if you are distinguishing poor as everyone below middle class, and this is your definition of middle class, then you're simply claiming that everyone is poor.
Saying "poor people do X" now just boils down to "some people do X" [for example, the claim that poor people buy $1000 retail iPhones]. To me, that's not a very useful or interesting definition for this purpose.
That's all nice and rosy but current picture is veering from this away more and more. Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth. And US, say compared to Europe is clearly class-based social system where divider is your wealth.
So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
Your WWI remarks are not correct (any fresh joining recruits would compare well to starved demoralized decimated trench troops). Read some german WWI literature, they didn't care much US specifically joining the fight, it was just more enemies. If Australians would come, it would be the same.
> Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth.
I personally know several millionaires who arrived in America with a suitcase and a dream.
> class-based social system where divider is your wealth.
The usual definition of a class is legal privilege based on your parents. This does not exist in the US.
> So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).
People aren't desperately trampling 1000 miles and throwing their kids over the wall just to be poor. In America, they have freedom and a darn good chance to do well. Communist countries are different, they have to build walls to keep their citizens from escaping Utopia.
> Read some german WWI literature
I've read about WW1 from actual historians.
What do think the beaten down German soldiers would have thought encountering masses of American troops better equipped and far better fed than they ever were?
> The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history.
This is not true, historians collectively agree that Korea has seen the most spectacular rise.
Also, your comment was spectacularly off-topic and anachronistic. A country being a manufacturing powerhouse during WW2 doesn't mean that immigrants have a fair chance today. First they need to be able to enter, then they need to be able to succeed. That's the topic.
S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more. Besides, SK's economy is free market, not communism.
> First they need to be able to enter,
100,000 per month are flooding over the border.
> then they need to be able to succeed.
Evidently they believe they can, or they wouldn't come.
As for around here in Seattle, there are immigrants everywhere. I jog through the park most days, and I hear languages from all over the world. They have their stereos blasting away, and large families with kids running around, and parked cars line the street. The smells coming from their cooking are delightful, I wish they'd offer me a bite :-)
Looks to me like they're doing very well.
I have no idea how you can conclude that the American door to immigration is shut, or that they are doing badly.
> S. Korea's population is 51 million. The US elevated far more.
You can't talk about countries with relative sizes and use absolute numbers. If you want to use this fallacy, I can tell you that the US is dwarfed by the whole of Asia.
Anyway, the original argument was that the USA isn't a country where everyone has a fair chance, but you absolutely want to turn it into anti-communist, pro-free-market propaganda.
The US could do all that because they removed the free market from the economy. Everything was turned into a planned economy to feed the war effort. Free markets would have completely failed in this case.
In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when facing GIs in WW2.
Of course, with free markets and prosperity, the Germans and Japanese have since caught up.
(In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them.)