I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
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0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.