theluckycountry wrote:The US became the world's supplier of machinery etc after WWII didn't it, Huge factory complexes springing up to produce everything from Sulfuric acid to John Deere tractors and TV sets. An expansion from the military industrial base that won the war and saw millions move to factory towns.
The underlying enabler was the US dominance in oil production for the first three/quarters of the 20th century. Virtually unlimited availability of fuel built the capacity to win the wars. I believe anyway.
Take a look at this great animation.We have lots of land area and huge resources. But the difference between us and say Venezuela, who also has big resources (and other south American countries as well) is they were operated as colonies in the beginning. What I mean is a few Europeans occupied and enslaved the indigenous and shipped whatever booty back to Spain (or whichever).
Colonial America was more of a mercantilist enterprise with Briton providing military protection to the investor-backed colonists, taking their cut in taxes and increased wealth in London. The difference being many of the indentured employees of those British investors received land at the end of their contract and that gives the US it's long history of ownership... and of course with ownership comes resource exploitation.
So simpler: instead of some King granting 6 gazillion acres to the Earl of Gutwater who proceeded to enslave the locals who got nothing from the deal, America was colonized by commoners who became actual owners of the land and resources.
The Earl might want to extract as much wealth as possible, as fast as possible, but because his workers aren't all that motivated he just hits the high spots. In the US, the reason there can be half a million stripper wells is they are
owned & operated by "the worker." A little guy can eek out a profit where the big corporation (the equivalent of yesterday's Conquistadors and "governors") just can't take the time to bother.
Point being still today in many places the government owns the resources regardless of whose name is on the deed. Gov. ownership can be either good or bad, depending on the government but in virtually every case if the citizen owns the resource it will be plundered. That is our birthright, the American Dream.
Is that why Detroit was abandoned, because too much industry closed down? What about Akron, Pittsburgh and all those other former industrial towns, how are they faring now the revolution has moved to China? Some say certain cities re-invented themselves and are as good as ever but who can say, with all the manipulation of statistics, government aid and debt is it just so much lipstick on a pig?
Private ownership capitalism demands a profit, and doesn't care where it is from. Once the easiest resources are depleted and the price rises, you need to import material anyway, so there is no reason to stay in one particular location.
Originally, Detroit and other "rust belt" towns were near iron, wood (for early auto chassis) water for and rail for transport. Back when the ICE was displacing farmers, they were the perfect source of cheap labor. Once some low level of displaced farmers was reached, their price began to rise too. Containerization eliminated labor on the docks and made transport less of a consideration. Automation enabled less skilled labor so cheap labor became the profit imperative. It was inevitable everything would simply move where the cheap labor was.
What matters is your standard of living, with the embellishments of personal debt taken out. And from what I see there, and even here in OZ, the equation is not good. Millions of people crammed into cities, loaded down with personal debt. It's a recipe for disaster without cheap energy.
Don't know much about debt in the abstract except that it is a lien on the future. A tomorrow built on today's reality of gross waste of resources. Because we don't have much of a shared ethnicity Americans aren't very homogenous. We were never a much of a society, hence the ease of splitting us along every possible identity line. At heart we're merely a mercantilist collection of extractors. That served us well in the growth phase when even the commoners shared in the booty. But it is already hurting us badly before the real pinch even occurs.
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*A majority of the natives were conveniently killed-off by European disease with patient zero being the conquistadores. I've been doing lots of genealogy and apparently quite a few of my people came over indentured and worked off their debts, not the same as slaves but not members of the peerage with a Kings charter either. There is a surprising number of Dukes and Earls just a generation or two before
my earliest immigrant ancestors 9 or 10 generations back.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)