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Comment by pnut | Hacker News Reader

America is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known. It's not because we're situated on a mountain of rubies, or that we are intellectually superior to other countries.

It's because of our system of government. This talk about the government being the problem, causing harm to the economy, really irritates me - the American economy owes its very existence to the American government and the private property protections it offers in the forms of regulations, legal system, social welfare programs, public education, military, etc etc etc.

If you can't stomach the sausage making in the US without losing respect for all the greatness it permits, just stop paying attention and vote for whoever says what feels right, that's the American way.

Your italicized real recovery sounds like another adrenaline boost in the arm, rather than the robust, sustainable recovery that is actually occurring.

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> America is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known. It's not because we're situated on a mountain of rubies, or that we are intellectually superior to other countries. It's because of our system of government.

I'm not taking any position against your overall point, and I do think there are many (relatively) uniquely American policies that historically have paid wonderful dividends; but you're vastly underestimating the exogenous geographic advantages of America (and I'm not sure if you're doing this, but most people tend to overestimate how long global American hegemony has existed).

We're sitting on 50% of the world's navigable internal waterways, overlaid over by the world's largest piece of contiguous farmland[1]. We've got ports that allow easy direct shipping access to most of the rest of the world's economy (Western Europe and China/Japan/India; We also have easy direct shipping access to South America and Africa, but those have naturally been less important). We've got enormous natural borders with the rest of the powers that were most recently useful in the fact that we've had the luxury of staying out of the incredibly catastrophic wars of the rest of the world more or less until we decided to enter[2] (and to the degree that we decide to enter). Those also enabled us to escape essentially 100% of the physical destruction of those wars.

[1] https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-... This is an excellent article with a lot more depth than the couple of stats I referenced; there's also a part 2 that I recommend reading.

[2] Obviously less true for Pearl Harbor, but still true to an extent: consider the impact of a surprise attack for Germany -> France as opposed to for Japan -> US. Crossing the Pacific is infinitely harder than crossing Belgium.

> America is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known. It's not because we're situated on a mountain of rubies, or that we are intellectually superior to other countries.

> It's because of our system of government.

No, it's because of the relative freedom you enjoyed in the past. Strangely enough, the less of the fruits of people's labour you forcefully take away from them, the more motivated they are to produce.

The easier it is to do business, the more business will be done. Go figure.

There's a reason people were flocking to America from all over the world, and it wasn't to get horribly oppressed by filthy capitalist "Robber Barons".

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