Why is America the world’s richest nation? Is it mostly because of the government, or is it thanks to entrepreneurs and businessmen? Historian Burt Folsom of Hillsdale College explains.
Donate today to PragerU!
Joining PragerU is free! Sign up now to get all our videos as soon as they’re released.
Download Pragerpedia on your iPhone or Android! Thousands of sources and facts at your fingertips.
iPhone:
Android:
Join Prager United to get new swag every quarter, exclusive early access to our videos, and an annual TownHall phone call with Dennis Prager!
Join PragerU’s text list to have these videos, free merchandise giveaways and breaking announcements sent directly to your phone!
Do you shop on Amazon? Click and a percentage of every Amazon purchase will be donated to PragerU. Same great products. Same low price. Shopping made meaningful.
VISIT PragerU!
FOLLOW us!
Facebook:
Twitter:
Instagram:
PragerU is on Snapchat!
JOIN PragerFORCE!
For Students:
JOIN our Educators Network!
Script:
The United States is the world’s most prosperous economy. It’s been that way for so long — over a hundred years — that we take it for granted.
But how did it happen?
There are many answers, of course. One is that the United States values the free market over government control of the economy.
But here’s a point that is seldom made:
It didn’t begin that way
Before the country placed its trust in the free market, it trusted the government to make important business decisions. Or to put it another way, only after the government failed repeatedly to promote economic growth and only after private enterprise succeeded where the government failed did the United States start to develop a world beating economy.
Let’s look at three telling examples:
In 1808 John Jacob Astor formed the American Fur Company and marketed American furs around the world. Europeans adored beaver hats for their peerless warmth and durability. Astor gave them what they wanted.
Instead of leaving the fur business to capable entrepreneurs like Astor, the government decided it wanted to be in on the action.
So, it subsidized its own fur company run by a self-promoting government official named Thomas McKenney. McKenney should have won the competition. After all, he had the federal government backing him.
But while Astor employed hundreds of people and still made a tidy profit, McKenney’s company lost money every year. Finally, Congress in 1822, came to its senses and ended the subsidies for McKenney and his associates.
A similar situation developed in the 1840’s around the telegraph.
The telegraph was the first step toward the instant communication we have today. Invented by Samuel Morse, the telegraph transmitted sound – as dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet.
Morse built his first telegraph wire between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore with the help of a government grant. Morse, more of an idealist than businessman, agreed to let the government own and operate the telegraph “in the national interest.”
But the government steadily lost money each month it operated the telegraph. During 1845, expenditures for the telegraph exceeded revenue by six-to-one and sometimes by ten-to-one. Seeing no value in the invention, Congress turned the money-loser over to private enterprise.
In the hands of entrepreneurs, the business took off. Telegraph promoters showed the press how it could instantly report stories occurring hundreds of miles away. Bankers, stock brokers and insurance companies saw how they could instantly monitor investments near and far. And dozens of other valuable uses were soon discovered.
As the quality of service improved, telegraph lines were strung across the country – from 40 miles of wire in 1846 to 23,000 miles in 1852. By the 1860s, the U.S. had a transcontinental telegraph wire. And by the end of that decade entrepreneurs had strung a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
Why didn’t the US government profitably use what Morse had invented? Part of the answer is that the incentives for bureaucrats differ sharply from those of entrepreneurs. When government operated the telegraph, Washington bureaucrats received no profits from the messages they sent, and the cash they lost was the taxpayers’, not their own. So government officials had no incentive to improve service, to find new customers, or to expand to more cities.
For the complete script, visit
لینک دانلود
On the back of indigenous peoples https://www.whytheracecardisplayed.com
Because they bomb countries for no particular reason and steal everything
It doesn't make who's the president of the USA. But we're still the most richest and powerful country in the world
True that a lot of economic prosperity does come from the free enterprise however you are being disingenuous by using 1800s anecdotes it just seems like you are purposely ignoring modern examples to use because it wouldn't fit with your narrative. So this is exactly what most right wingers do. They love to cherry pick and people fall for their so called "evidence". Let's see what would happen if you suddenly stopped subsidizing farmers. The economy would crash that's what would happen.
Printing dollars endlessly helps too.
Here is California, we pay a shit load of taxes. So much in fact that it is hard to keep a business open
The truth of the matter everybody should watch his videos he should be in schools colleges and universities after all they are there to make you think and give you an informed overview of how your country runs and what made it prosperous in the first place
In today's episode of capitalist propaganda:
Could get the mailing list of all the antifa members and send them a free DVD. Government dose not love you!!!
Can anyone say Post Office?
We straight BALLER!
If PragerEWE really believed in the Free Market, they'd leave YouTube instead of suing it.
i think https://youtu.be/kdrjaXbudbk
Governments can’t run business because of beurocracy and corruption which are one in the same
America is not so rich. If we consider GDP per capita, SEVEN countries are doing better than USA, with Luxemburg's GDP per capita being ALMOST DOUBLE compared to USA.
America is rich because it's people are poor. PERIOD.
Free trade for Citizens and normal business, Socialism for Large Corporations
Because after ww2 literally all of the developed world except the US was brought to rubble.
Now stop glorifying the free market and letting poor people suffer and small businesses die just because you've done it before and it used to work. Right now we Europeans are doing the exact opposite of what you are doing and undoubtedly we live much better than you, so maybe you should reconsider your strategy for success.
And before you've asked, no, I'm not Russian and I do not want all Americans killed and I certainly do not glorify Putin.
The biggest drain on the economy is the unaccountable government bureaucracy. Redistributing other people’s hard earned money to feed power hungry bureaucrats. ✌🏼🇺🇸
They are rich because they steal other countries resources.
I just want to see some YouTuber in America but I live I london
Oh No ! Bernie Sander followers are gonna cry now that they know the truth
Well they stole a native American country then stole they're gold they're oil , also stole gold from Nazi Germany
america is fake.
They have been robbing other nations overseas and sold weapons around the globe. And there are jews…
Is the free market in US healthcare proud of overcharging, over prescribing and creating the opioid crisis that kills so many of its citizens……….or is it just an unfortunate corollary that ensures that Drs, Dentists and Pharma execs can afford to buy personal aircraft?
This video did not explain how the government lost money and private enterprises gained money. Very poor video explanation. Come on PragerU, what happened to your videos? They used to portray much more better explanations. Disliked.
This is bullsit. FeEx does really well!
The short answer is: genuine MERITOCRACY. The government does not, in general, employ the best people to perform the job while private companies , again not all the time but in general, hire the best people they can find to do the job. Having said that privatization of infrastructure and other public services is usually not beneficial to the wide public as often the quality of services is diminished and prices increased after a private company takes over.
America is not rich it’s the poorest country in my opinion. 99%of wealth in the hands of the rich and the entire population live on the 1% I should have thought twice before taking the plane to here and leave Dubai. I must be crazy
Such a simplistic take. How about these (just to name a few)?
1) A strong respect for personal property rights in the law, excellent support for contracts, and a fantastic, well developed credit system and a complex financial sector;
2) vast natural resources that private companies were ALLOWED to exploit using the tools in item #1;
3) a fascination for basic science that was powerfully supported by large government grants (not anymore since 1992 or so when we started to abandon and demonize public funding);
4) an open, decentralized political and economic system that (at least until 1980 or so), used government power to crush monopolies and break them apart. We've totally lost that and it's destroying our economy.
5) our anti-union ways have given our companies the ability to compete internationally;
6) just a ton of other things strongly linked to our democratic, market-centric system.
Because dem rob most of the rest of the world period
If free market works, why the USA get get an economic crisis in 1929 and 2008? The free market isn't perfect but, at least, is better than the socialism policy. Governement just need to be here to make sure that everything is ok.
No they are not rich they’re stealing people’s money only America is one of the most poor land in the world history
OIL! 🇺🇸💰🛢
Why? Because they are all birches!
The "free market" is so often spoken of as a hallowed American tradition that many Americans forget how new it is. For many decades after this country's winning of independence, protectionism was the rule rather than the exception. The distribution of wealth was extremely lopsided, with the rich receiving plenty of government perks on the one hand and many more Americans existing at near-subsistence level on the other. Politicians did not start to champion small businesses until the 1890s, and most tariffs were not done away with until the 1940s. Even after that, it was taken for granted that the government had an essential role to play in shaping the economy; in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's economic libertarianism was considered just as radical as neo-socialism is today. In short, today's "conservatives" are actually pretty left-wing compared to their 18th, 19th, and early 20th-century forebears.
By stealing
Kick the government out and the country becomes prosperous 😂😂