One way to read history
We always find it both amusing and disturbing when those on the Left seem to attribute the rise in wealth in America over the last hundred years to the progressive movment. Senator Clinton:
at the turn of the 20th century. Back then, the American economy was dominated by large corporate monopolies. Corruption was far too common and good government far too rare. Women couldn’t vote, and the minimum wage, well, that wasn’t heard of and worker rights were completely unimagined. Back then, America was a country filled with haves and have nots — and not enough people in between.
In response to these excesses, the progressive movement was born. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, the progressives busted trusts and fought for safe working conditions and fair wages. They created the national park system, and replaced a government rife with cronyism with a merit-based civil service. They understood, as the great progressive President Teddy Roosevelt once said, that “The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.”
We are quite sure there are many college graduates who feel sophisticated and confident in their belief that American prosperity was built by some combination of Samuel Gompers, Emma Goldman, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the New Deal. Indeed, we seem to recall Howell Raines saying something similar a while back.
It’s not that Senator Clinton is wrong exactly; it’s that she juxtaposes the part of 20% importance with the far more compelling and unique story of the 80% of the reason for American prosperity. As we have said from time to time:
Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.
Mostly it is because far more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and over 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.
Put another way, we wish the politicians who are so interested in imperiling the life of the Golden Goose would first acknowledge the existence of said Goose, and the grave difficulties overcome by our countrymen in creating the Golden Goose from the raw material of the American character and American capitalism.
June 2nd, 2007 at 9:39 am
Killing the goose through over-regulation and the temptation of remaking society through social engineering is such a human failing that one might think it would be acknowledged by all while the power to do so would be strictly limited through a social compact of some kind like, say, a constitution?
All kidding aside, an important and very efficient check on such abuses of power would be to generate all necessary revenue through consumption taxes rather than through taxes on ‘income’ (whatever that is), savings, wages and capital. Taxing consumption at the final stage rather than income would remove all of the special interest pleading, corporate contributions and corruption as well as the means utilized by government to achieve the unachievable: abstract and redistributionist equality. Automatic checks would be in place since overtaxing would destroy consumption and the revenue generated. The state would be forced to economize to a degree while it’s cost would be almost completely transparent to the man in the street. High consumers would pay more while savings and capital formation among wage earners trying to save in order to start businesses or provide eduations for their kids would get a tremendous boost. There is an inherent, objective measure of real justice in such a system aside from a praqtical check on the state sadly missing from our current system. No one can avoid consumption and the taxes laid on consumption. Criminals, drug dealers, pimps and other conspicuous consumers would finally be paying into the sytem. The government’s tendency to lay taxes on taxes, i.e. current excise taxes, would no longer be necessary in order to achieve constructive social goals like reducing fuel consumption. The regulatory burden would be greatly reduced, as well.