Posted on 09/14/2019 9:38:24 AM PDT by TBP
We study history to learn from it. If we can discover what worked and what didn’t work, we can use this knowledge wisely to create a better future. Studying the triumph of American industry, for example, is important because it is the story of how the United States became the world’s leading economic power. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
The years when this happened, from 1865 to the early 1900s, saw the U.S. encourage entrepreneurs indirectly by limiting government. Slavery was abolished and so was the income tax. Federal spending was slashed and federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s. In other words, the federal government created more freedom and a stable marketplace in which entrepreneurs could operate.
To some extent, during the late 1800s—a period historians call the “Gilded Age”—American politicians learned from the past. They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed. Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development. The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government. And when politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs, high income taxes, anti-trust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war—the results again often hindered American economic progress. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
There was an income tax enacted in the 1860s to fund the war. It ended in 1900. A few years later, the progressives reinstituted the income tax via the 16th Amendment.
You can’t even get the left to say, “Those regulations we’ve put on factories and cars has really helped, but we need to do more.” Decades and decades of environmental regulation and I have never once heard anything but doom and gloom, we’re all gonna die, Republicans hate the earth.
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