The 1700 and 1800's - The Era of Misery

How much regulation? Lets see, right to work states are just as safe as union ones so lets stop pretending they matter. Workplace safety has improved on the same trend line regardless of OSHA so lets drop them. Lawyers can do the rest, but lets stop discrimination lawsuits. They hurt employment of the protected group. Look how far employment among the disabled tanked after the ADA.

 

You'd have to show me the stats on that.

 

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1995/10/v18n4-5.pdf

Page 48.

 

The term was coined by Mark Twain, a sarcastic satirist.

"The term was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, satirizing what they believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding."
Yes there was a big economic boom, but major social problems that went along with it like child labor and insane work hours. Of course you are going to have economic property when you are treating the population like (*)(*)(*)(*) under social darwinism.

 

The federal government was partly "abolished" decades ago with the formation of a central banking system controlled by commercial banks, the use of a reserve currency, and voodoo economics.

 

And yet life expectancy climbed thoughout the period and compared to the period that proceeded it, this was a golden age. People in both the US and Britain during that time often moved in and out of poverty repeatedly. It is also the period in which the term new money was coined, in Europe, so the nobility could have a way to continue to look down on those who often were richer than they.

 

Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or perhaps two slaves), [Mark Twain] had had his youth and early manhood in the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries.
--George Orwell, The Licensed Jester

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/twain/english/e_twain

 

Once we harnessed the power of fossil fuels, and generated electricity to power industry and bring mobility and light into our lives and homes, well, you can see from the graph, things changed for the better. There is only so much growth when crude manual labor and the setting of the sun dictate what you can accomplish.

 

...and state control over the federal government declined with the 17th amendment.

 

Ralfy it isn't commercial banks that own the federal reserve rather the other way around.

 

Most people don't know it, but the Federal Reserve Bank is a private institution, not part of the government. The President nominates the Fed's chairman, and has heavy input, but the Fed is still private, just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Fed regulates commercial banks, not vice versa.

The US Dollar is still the global reserve currency. WW2 upset traditional trade systems, so all 44 Allied powers sent their finance ministers to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 to come up with a new system. Since the US had the strongest economy, they agreed to use the US Dollar as their reserve. What this means is that governments around the world use US Dollars to back their own currencies. Instead of holding gold or silver reserves, they hold US Dollars instead. This system still works, though it's being eroded by the weakening Dollar. Because the US Dollar is the reserve currency, it's also the currency used for international trade. If a French company wants to buy iron, or a Japanese company wants to buy oil, they must pay in Dollars, not Euros or Yen. For this reason, there's a huge demand for Dollars outside the US. Governments, businesses, and people all want Dollars. This has been both good and bad for the US. The good part is that it's been effortless for us to import goods or to pay foreign debts - we can just print Dollars to pay. No other country in the world can do that. They have to produce goods and services people want to buy. But everyone needs the reserve currency. The bad part is that it's been so effortless for us to just print money knowing that the world wants it that we've allowed our productive capacity to weaken. If we had to earn money, it would be harder for us to do. Now we depend on the demand for Dollars created by our having the global reserve currency. If the Dollar ever lost its position, we'd be devastated. It would be worse than the Great Depression. We could no longer afford most of what we import and there would be hyperinflation and massive job loss. This isn't just a theoretical risk. Proposals to replace the Dollar with an international trade scrip backed by the Dollar, the Chinese Yuan, and credits at the World Bank have circulated for a few years now. If the US continues to run vast deficits with low interest, further weakening the Dollar, our position may become untenable.

"Voodoo economics" was George H.W. Bush's catch-phrase for Reagan's economic policies when he ran against Reagan in 1980 for the Republican Presidential nomination. What he meant was Reagan's idea that tax revenues would increase if tax rates were cut. Reagan cut tax rates, and tax revenues increased.

 

It would not have mattered as both involve governments. The change began with industrialists, and later the financial elite, controlling the economy.

- - - Updated - - -

It's the other way round. The Fed is a private consortium of commercial banks.

 

The argument that seems to be made by much of this is that OSHA slowed the fall in accident rates at work. I'd argue it's more of a mathematical phenomenon.

It's easier to show a greater degree of reductions in accidents when you're on the high end of things than when you're on a much lower point. While it is true that workplace accidents were falling before OSHA, it's rather difficult to suggest that OSHA slowed down this rate when the starting point is lower to begin with. It's just the basic nature of the law of diminishing returns.

Now, admittedly, you could also make the argument that proving OSHA reduced accidents more than the ongoing trend is difficult as well.

 

During that period of time a lot of people went generations and the only time they even saw a federal government employee was the postman.

According to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1818_1842USp_15s1li111mcn_F0f the 1830 federal spending was $17 million or less than 2% of GDP. No wonder the economy grew so fast.

 

Well, except for black people in most cases.

 

There was a very large population of free blacks in both the north and the south.

 

Ah, the 1800's. Where we went from sail boats, horse plows and hand tools to steam engines, tractors, automobiles, manufacturing plants and airplanes in less than a century.

A level of progress only surpassed by the 1900s.

People should rip on the 19th century less.

 

People don't look at the rate at which we progressed but at the absolute standard of living they enjoyed at the time. Makes it easier to dismiss their economic system as barbaric.

 

And a much larger slave one in the South.

 

I'm not denying that. Slavery was still practiced at the time, but there was also a growing abolitionist movement that was making good progress towards de-legitimizing and ending it. People tend to fixate on the existence of slavery at the time and ignore the progress that was being made in almost every part of society. An analogy would be like looking at two people racing and saying the faster person is slower because they started 150 meters behind the other runner. You're looking at where they are at any given moment instead of looking at how fast they're moving.

 

Sure, but the Civil War did speed up the process considerably.

 

Only inadvertently, though, and at great expense to life and liberty.

 

How was it an expense to liberty?

 

Read the whole thing and you'll know my position on the matter: http://lysanderspooner.org/node/44

 

Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his career.
--George Orwell