and to achieve anarchy like in Somalia you need a significant level of deregulation. Even places like Russia are problematic so we should cast a wary eye on each step in the direction of deregulation....
Absolutely we should. But there has to be a zone between over regulated and under regulated where people can live and have freedom. I tend to think you see every regulation that comes out as a good thing, or at the very least you are ready to try a regulation first, and then discard it. I'm more prone to move cautiously any time the government is seeking to exercise more power -- because once it has exercised a power it is generally very difficult to get it to stop exercising it. The "discard" pile is very thin.
Not accurate. You have SPECIFICALLY singled out the Gilded Age regulatory regime as the one you think is ideal.
And that is simply not true. I have picked out that era as one in which the authority of the federal government was appropriately held within the limits of the Constitution. That does not mean that it did the best job it could do within those limits. Much of what lead to the negatives in the Gilded Age amounted to commercial abuse that was well within the legitimate, constitutional regulatory authority over interstate commerce. My objections to later regulatory schemes is that they use distorted readings of the Constitution to achieve their regulatory goals -- defining as interstate commerce that is in no way interstate is just one example.
For all the criticisms of that era, ... the nation grew in both population and GDP,[/quote]
And it grew SLOWER than the historic average from 1933-1999.[/QUOTE]
You attribute this to more regulation. I attribute it to a rapidly improving technological environment that provided great strides in productivity -- and I'll note that our heavy industry has fallen dramatically since the 1980s, in short, when we had most of the regulations on safety, pollutants and worker protections that you laud so highly. The jobs where those "expenses" had been "externalized" are now overseas -- and they won't be coming back.
Remember the steam engine, the weaving machine, the RR ALL were invented elsewhere. And also remember that in essence the USA was achieving this growth with the presence of de facto slavery in the form of Jim Crow
The steam engine was invented in the United States, or at least one very early version of it was (I'm drawing a blank on the name -- but there was a very early steamboat that ran up the Delaware to Philadelphia while George Washington was still alive). Setting aside that historical quibble, we did in the 19th century what the Chinese and Japanese do today -- other people had the inventions, but we had the practical uses and the production capabilities to make them useful. And yes, America had Jim Crow, the British effectively enslaved the Welsh, Irish, South Africans and the entire subcontinent of India, there were the atrocities of the French and Belgian Congos, the Chinese had coolies and also practiced direct chattel slavery. There wasn't a developed nation in the world that had any moral high ground on this issue. And yet around the world, it was a time of innovation and invention that was for the most part seen as more golden than gilded.
With MASSIVE GOVERNMENT FUNDING
Not really -- it was mostly with the donation of alternating sections of free land. This was used to capitalize bonds, which were then the result of a huge scandal involving the French government and numerous of our own home-grown robber barons (do some readings on the
Credit Mobilier scandal).
On a per capita basis we were POORER than all of old europe despite dramatically more raw resources and people
And yet the poor of Europe scrambled to get here. There are a lot of ways to measure poverty, Degs. America, at least, offered the hope of improving your status.
Simply not true. We can and did force them to work in them to pay off their debts. Debts acquired essentially through fraud.
They were not legally required to enter into those debts, but yes, we could require someone to pay off debts -- are you saying we shouldn't?
IT WAS NOT STELLAR GROWTH RATE. the economic data simply show that to be false. Furthermore much of it was done on the backs of the majority of the population being completely disenfranchised, and the final massive genocide of the Amerinds was practice
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Perhaps "stellar" was too strong a word. The economy showed growth. And as I said, you keep dragging in issues such as racism, where no other country was better than our own, and the destruction of the Amerinds, where our government was a latecomer. If you can show me how these are relevant, then they might be a topic for discussion, but until then, well, tell it not to the Greeks but to the Sikhs, who received such great treatment from the British.
You simply ignore these inconvenient facts.
As I ignore all irrelevancies.
Then you need to read more history. Tammany Hall is but the quintessence of that. The RRs are another. If you think Kelo was wrongly decided, then you sure cannot like the Gilded Age Becaues the use of political power to use Eminent Domain to take property was far worse then. As for corruption, go back and read why the 17th Amendment was even proposed.
Really, I addressed this above. I've never said there is no place for federal regulation, and I think it was under-used in this period, and there are constitutional ways to address these and other problems. My sole legal objection to the sort of regulations you favor is that I seen no constitutional grounding for them outside of unnatural readings of various constitutional terms such as "commerce" and "general welfare."
We cannot have a society that treats people differently based on things they cannot control - like Race. And if that requires regulations to ameliorate that by RECOGNIZING that society is doing so, then we have to have such laws. And yet such laws inherently are going to REQUIRE discrimination of A from B.
I could not control the income level of the family into which I was born -- but society has treated me better or worse because of that accident just as it would treat me better or worse because of my origins if I were Irish or Asian. It isn't the government's role to ameliorate this, and it is an exercise in futility for the government to try.
As for income - the only laws that treat the wealthy differently are ones that allow them to do things like write off their hobbies as "business expenses" while 99% of Americans cannot.
And the one's that take away half their property if they die suddenly, etc., let's not forget those. How about the difference between someone who is middle class and elected to be responsible and not have children they couldn't afford -- they get taxed. But the slattern with three unsupported kids in the trailer across the road smoking an unfiltered Camel gets the earned income tax credit. Yeah --we're all equal before the law, just as we're guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, right?
You see what you believe. not what is there. And that comes from your belief in the difference of society and government. You seem to ignore the part of the Constitution that says
WE THE PEOPLE
WE THE PEOPLE would include rich, poor, white, black all the same, Degs.