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Essay on Economic History of the US
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the position of the United States in world affairs has no equivalent in history. No one thought the war would be easy. But all, except perhaps for a few of the country's enemies, blinded by ideology, thought that the United States would prevail. In the final days of the Roman Republic two thousand years earlier, the sinews of war are infinite money. About the only perceived weakness in the American economy was the unfavorable trade balance. But that was to a large extent an artifact not of American weakness, but of the weakness of foreign economies.
In 1824 the Supreme Court said that interstate commerce was exclusively the province of the federal government and gave us the first realty continental-sized common market in the world. The American economy prospered mightily therefrom. The fewer impediments there are to transactions, the better off everybody is. After Gibbons, for instance, the transportation system in this country exploded with the end of the New York monopoly on steamboats. Prices came down wonderfully. One of the biggest pieces of luck was that the United States was a child of England rather than a child of Spain. Argentina and others imported Spain's top-down control of the economy and every other aspect of life. England did not actually found the American colonies. They were founded by profit-seeking corporations or by individual proprietors such as William Penn.
England did not control emigration. In fact it dumped prisoners and dissidents. These people made for interesting entrepreneurs because they were more independent in their thinking and therefore more risk-taking and more willing to go do it. If America is famous for its get-up-and-go, it is because the US has ancestors who got up and came.In the case of textile technology, Samuel Slater was British and he memorized the plans of the textile machinery and then smuggled himself out of Britain......
