Dear Ron Paul:
You apparently think that the economic growth of the 1800’s and early 1900’s was because we had no Fed. This is because you ignore things that are…different…than they are now.
— Like the fact that we had just come off of a serious case of economic growth via SLAVE LABOR. Nothing like an endless supply of expendable labor to speed economic growth! And now that “the blacks” were freed, denied basic education, and the resources to create their own economic growth — in those cases where they weren’t just outright lied to, the land they had legally earned or bought stolen, and flat-out undermined, terrorized by the Klan, denied access to the same economic and financial resources available to white people (such as home loans), if not killed — they could be exploited! And they were! Woo hoo! (/snark)
— There’s the fact that before that, life sucked for everyone who wasn’t rich, so the growth brought by the Industrial Revolution was a pretty relative thing. There’s no middle class or suburbia here, more like, “Woo, I own a horse! Life is SO AWESOME, I am totally FREE!!!” and everyone is JEALOUS because that person has…transportation. That’s it.
— There’s the fact that that time was when we REALLY started exploiting our nation’s natural resources that we got by luck and bloodthirsty war (yay for stealing land from Native Americans!). Coal. Gold. Lumber. Oil. We just basically started hacking into stuff and seeing what we could do with what came out. That’s not exactly something we can do anymore, assuming we even would want to.
— There’s the fact that this was (largely) before the Progressive Era, so we had beautiful things like child labor, factories where working conditions killed and maimed workers by the hundreds and thousands, nonexistant quality and safety standards (ever read The Jungle and what went in to meat before we added that pesky, big government intervention?), and no minimum wage or maximum hours so you could pay workers next to nothing, use them up, and terrify them with the prospect of losing their job to a fresher immigrant who wasn’t a tired, broken drone. I’m not talking “ooh, sexual harrassment bad working conditions” and “I only get 79 cents to a man’s dollar” working conditions (which most people agree are pretty messed up), I’m talking 79 cents AN HOUR for 12 HOURS working conditions. Stuff we can’t even IMAGINE today.
Things like this are why you cannot honestly compare that time period today, and using it as a model for our modern economy would be…hazardous, likely with haphazard success at best. We don’t WANT to go back to the way things were back then for a reason. Those reforms were introduced for a reason. We ran out of resources FOR A REASON.
History should be an example, but it is not the answer. Don’t be the Network TV Executive that keeps reviving an old show idea that really should just die with dignity because “It tested well in the first four seasons!”
Don’t be that guy.
Any more than you already are, I mean.
