He's commenting on the attitude driving the tariffs.
The only unique thing about America is free markets. Any country can become highly successful by enacting free markets. The only thing in the way is their disbelief that they work.
There's a common thread across the world and history. The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.
Japan, S Korea and Hong Kong have next to no natural resources. Great prosperity.
Germany turned to free markets after WW2 and enjoyed the "German Miracle". (Germany has since turned to socialism, with predictable results.) Germany received far, far less Marshall Plan money than Britain and France, who had no miracle.
> but to say it's the only unique thing about America is just wrong
History shows otherwise.
Russia was also not industrialized until after their revolution in ~1920, and suffered horrific losses in the homeland during WW2.
The US emerged from WW2 fully industrialized and nearly unscathed. The US mainland remained untouched throughout both world wars.
The starting positions were far from equal. You attribute too much to free markets.
Minus some balloons from the Japanese I believe?
Russia did not industrialize in the 1920s. They did collectivize agriculture, famine ensued. They turned back to free market farming, famine went away. They turned again to collectivization, and farming collapsed again. Eventually, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots and sell what they could raise. These small free market plots kept the country from starving.
Russia did work hard at industrializing during WW2, but it was propped up by the US, who heavily supplied the Soviets. The US actually built factories in the US, dismantled them, and shipped them to the Soviet Union during the war. US engineers and craftsmen taught them.
When WW2 ended, the Soviets looted everything industrial they could find from the Soviet sector. Whole factories were moved east. Soviet industrial output grew during the war.
British industry was also untouched, because the German bomber fleet did not have the range to cover much of Britain, and because Hitler stupidly decided to bomb houses instead of factories. Britain had a pretty anemic recovery from the war - despite getting far more Marshall Plan money than Germany.
Japan did not have a free market before the war, and not much of an industrial economy. Curtis LeMay had a hard time finding industrial targets to bomb, as Japanese industry was characterized as "a drill press in every home". Japan turned to free markets after the war, and we know what happened next. Recall that Japan was burned into ash in WW2. They went from utter defeat to economic superpower, despite not having any natural resources, in just 30 years.
How much more of an "unequal" starting point could there possibly be?
The only common characteristic of prosperity is free markets. And the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. Over and over. It goes back to the middle ages.
The other common characteristic is when countries turn towards socialism, things just get worse and worse for them.
These minus nukes and missiles plus battleships is pre-WWII Japan.
This may be helpful if you're curious why so many countries that choose free market instead of Communism after WWII are still not industrialized today.
The dollar becoming the reserve currency has given America a lot of power, however. It certainly is a factor in the way America is able to run a trade deficit and yet still benefit.
During WW2, the US was the most powerful economy in the world. It fought WW2 in both hemispheres (which required two navies), and supplied all the allies.
Japan was well aware they could never win a sustained war with the US, and hoped that the attack on Pearl Harbor would get them a negotiated settlement. Hitler, in probably the stupidest miscalculation in history, declared war on the US.
This is less unique than the dollar being the dominant reserve currency and dominant currency for settling international trade.
You appear to be putting the cart before the horse.
The dollar isn't dominant in international trade because the domestic market is free, like the above user was referencing. The dollar has been the dominant reserve currency and currency for international trade since it overtook the pound for both of those functions in the mid 20th century, which didn't coincide with the US having a free market.
Also, I wasn't make any causal relationship in my comment, like you seem to be implying. The fact that USD is the dominant reserve currency and dominant trade currency is unquestionably more unique than having free markets, considering that the US is truly completely unique in both of these regards, while it is not nearly as unique in having a free market.
The little "thing" or status of having reserve currency has allowed the US to enjoy lower international borrowing costs than anywhere else in the world. This has immensely benefited the US, in facilitating ease of borrowing with relatively low interest rates and by facilitating lower exchange rate risk in borrowing than any other nation.
And those were not based on free market choices, as the UK would have been just as much free, but it was a devastated economy in a small country.
And the existence proof for that assertion is which country, exactly? Lots of nations lack regulation of some form or another, many of them are "freer" than the US. The US isn't entirely "free" of trade barriers either (c.f. tariffpocalype).
Basically this sounds like a no-true-scotsman in the making. No, it's not that simple.
Socialism, on the other hand, makes things worse the closer one gets to "true" socialism.
Poverty in the US continued going down until 1968, when it began edging up again. 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
> 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
1968 was when Nixon was elected.
> During the 19th century, the US elevated scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class and beyond. The newly wealthy "aristocracy" sprang from the poor
I don't grasp the relevance of these 19th century events to today. How does it address the fact that today, for most of the population, US outcomes are worse than many peer countries?
Who are you quoting with "aristocracy" and did they really come from poor people or from the middle class?
If you like, name a wealthy American who came from royalty. I can't think of any.
Fun fact: the Titanic was not built to transport rich people to the US. Quite the contrary, the bulk of it was for poor people immigrating to the US. The first class section was for status and marketing. The money came from the rest of the human cargo.
That said, I agree that the economy of such a society has a better chance of succeeding, but it's at the cost of suffering of lots of people. Actually both extremes are bad - socialism has its problems, but so does the unchecked capitalism.
You can play the opposite game too: name a wealthy American who did not come from a multigenerational-upper-middle-class background (i.e. someone who's parents and grandparents were all well above median income).
Of the big names, the only one I can think of is Bezos (his adoptive father was an engineer, but a first generation immigrant with no established wealth). Everyone else, all of them AFAICT, came from backgrounds where they never had to worry about money or support through the early parts of their careers.
Poverty rates are significantly lower in the industrial world outside the US, even (especially!) in the "socialist" countries you seem to liken to LBJ policies. Seems like the same data you're referring to above cuts directly and strongly against this point.
Is that unique to America? I'm in EU, I thought we had free markets too.
> The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.
Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
The unique thing was that they then created another, less broadly shared, kind of prosperity by eliminating those protections and offshoring those industries, and focusing instead on dollar diplomacy.
Afaik the EU is regulated much more heavily in that area than the US, like here in Australia.
It makes sense to me that some amount of the US’ economic advantage comes from their ability to more efficiently match employees with the work currently demanded by the market.
Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.
> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
Not true. If it was true, N Korea would be massively prosperous.
Which measures of freedom became restricted in the EU following the GFC that led to the prosperity of the EU diverging from the US?
Free markets are chaotic, and are constantly reallocating resources from less efficient uses to more efficient uses.
Regulations that impede that make for lower prosperity.
How does your theory account for this?
Protecting markets is done with tariffs. Are you sure you want to assert that tariffs are good for the economy?
Simple, obvious contradiction: can every country enjoy the benefits of issuing the de facto reserve currency for the world? Just by having free markets?
The US has been incredibly privileged. I’d argue that was earned in some ways and lucky in others. But it’s undeniably true.
Free markets are a choice the US made. Any country can choose to have a free market, and some have. The reserve currency thing has nothing to do with it.
What would you say is the economic impact on a country of controlling a global reserve currency?
As long as the trend of capitalist market+power consolidation is considered to be 'less free market', I think I'd agree with you.
- Sincerely, an otherwise raging leftie
Not sure is this is what OP meant, but it's a huge advantage that the current administration seems bent on getting rid of
Digital services not being taxed/tariffed when exported whereas physical goods are, is purely a historical artifact. The US has managed to get the whole world addicted to their doomscrolling dopamine algorithms, raking in trillions of dollars. If these were physical goods, this would've been entirely different.
The heroine dealer of the world. So far they've been allowed this position, which is incredibly privileged. And now that the EU sometimes takes a (paltry) step towards slightly taxing the drugs, the dealer screams and kicks, "it's unfair! They're targeting just me!".
Japan and South Korea both had huge land reforms effectively killing the landlord class and redistributing farms to families.
They then forced businesses to export while maintaining high tariffs and once that was all in place they relaxed the tarifs and opened up the markets.
Countries that took the free market approach include Indonesia and Cambodia.