That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.
I think, across the board, people actually want mercy and grace. They’re not interested in fairness, they’re interested in help.
When they make mistakes, they want to be lifted up and forgiven. When they fall on hardship, even if their own making, they hope for help to recover.
It's typically the story of the prodigal son in the bible : it's unfair that the son that squandered away his inheritance gets back and is celebrated, while the son that was wise and helped his father does not get anything special.
Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.
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.)
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."
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13...
Edit: this appears to be a definitive account of wartime nationalization.
Industrialists in Olive Drab https://www.amazon.com/Industrialists-Olive-Drab-Operations-...
"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"
Full PDF: https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-32-1/CMH_Pub_70-3...
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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.
The USSR and China also had this access, and it didn't seem to do the trick for them. The US supplied the USSR.
Airplanes, tanks, food, etc. were not nationalized.
When they did, they produced vast amounts of war material, and possibly would have beaten the Germans single-handedly given another year or two.
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.
Not to mention that both started way worse than the US at their respective times.
- 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.
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.
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.
The fact that the forcing is done with debt and threats of homelessness and not at gunpoint is just an implementation detail.
Muahahaha, good one!
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.
How do you then explain the existence of sanctuary cities?
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.
The contemporary US might want to take note.
Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.
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.
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.
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.
China has arguably beaten (or is close to beating) that in very recent history.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-...
Emphasis here is on the past tense.
There are several reasons to challenge this:
1. The USA had (and still has) unprecedented resources per population. Why is your claim not still the case?
2. Immigrants tend to be people with the means to immigrate. That's rarely people in relative poverty, unless you intended to mean slaves.
> "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.
"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."
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.
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."
That seems like middle class people to me.
Do we have different definitions of poor?
Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli...
> 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.
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.
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.
Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.
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.
But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this.
Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This even understates it. WW2 resulted in the US being the major world power due to everything you list and more. A true historical turning point.
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.
I'm not buying that.
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.
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.
Note that you're talking in the past tense.
In practice at the aggregate population level, that is such an important distinction, and leads to the kind of pay-for-play judicial system the US increasingly practices, which weakens the US' internal signaling on important inefficiencies to root out. The more money tokens you put into the system, the more "fair" treatment you obtain, regardless of the negative externalities imposed. This is not new in history and around the world, but US rule of law has been declining for decades [1], and I believe it bodes ill for the US.
[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/us-falls-out-of-top-...
The meme about Soviet equality is pretty misleading. Their particular brand of autocracy increased inequality if anything, just expressed in different ways.
There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.
You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.
For example, Swiss are very social people. Up until recently they did not even have a minimal wage defined in some of the cantons, yet even the worst jobs are usually extremely well payed. I.e. a python developer has just like 2x more than a garbage man. Anything a human touches is expensive.
In European countries, even some of the Eastern ones, there is usually a top-notch single payer health care system. That's social.
You can also have a high quality state funded education systems. A social aspect of politics does not require you to go all dictatorial suppressing basic rights. Please stop using it. It's ridiculous.