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Again, the United States did not rise to 'superpower' status until after WW2.... as has now been pointed out by several posters.
The USA has had its best years SINCE the end up WW2, not BEFORE it.
We "survived," sure. Just as people "survived" without air conditioning, cars and planes.... there's a huge difference between THRIVING and SURVIVING.
If you are talking military super-power, true. But won WWII on two fronts was our great engines of industry, just about gunned, bulleted, bombed, tanked, shipped, airplaned the enemy. However, after having to pull the world's bacon out of the fire twice, we decided to end the isolationist (no entagling alliances) mentatlity and fill the vacumn of power before another Japan or Nazi Germany did.
Oh, so now the United States is thriving because we have these federal agencies? Before them, we were just getting by. I mean the invention of the lightbulb was surviving, but now that we're in 3 wars, 14 trillion in debt, have 40 million people on foodstamps, have crippling regulations, and have a mass of human beings who think they're entitled to successful people's hard work, we're thriving!
But because we have the internet and we're obese, my point must be moot.
Please define "thriving" and the period you would associate with USA as "thriving" based on that definition. The "is" aspect is getting my confused. For that matter, was America thriving more in the 1860s or in the 1960s?
If you are talking military super-power, true. But won WWII on two fronts was our great engines of industry, just about gunned, bulleted, bombed, tanked, shipped, airplaned the enemy. However, after having to pull the world's bacon out of the fire twice, we decided to end the isolationist (no entagling alliances) mentatlity and fill the vacumn of power before another Japan or Nazi Germany did.
The great engines of industry roared because Europe's were devestated by war.
After WW2, we jumped lightyears ahead while Europe rebuilt.
Today, Germany is an economic exporting power with a strong regulatory social democracy, while the United States lost its industrial base and glory.
My point is that somehow we got from point A (a new country) to point B (a powerful country) without these silly federal agencies. My question is, how did we make that HUUUUGE step, in such a short time, without all these bureaucratic, make-work federal agencies. HOW.DID.IT.HAPPEN.WITHOUT.THEM?
You're missing the point. We didn't even start to rise to prominence on the world stage until well after the Civil War ... AFTER the creation of a centralized federal government. There is no way we could be a world power and a loose confederation of a small states. In fact, it was the Whig/later Republican program of "internal improvements" (a number of projects binding the states together with the federal government in the lead) that gave us the competitive advantage over the better established, but less centralized, European states.
You can make an argument for a different America, one which is less centralized and less of a world player. Yes, we'd have a much smaller GDP, but we'd have fewer problems too ... as the saying goes, mo' money, mo' problems. The case you're trying to make is ridiculous, however. You're arguing that a loose collection of states can be the most powerful nation on Earth. Nope. To be a world player, you need an empire. To get an empire, you need to centralize the motherland. That's just the way the world works, VT. Study some more history. You're not even grasping the basics yet, dude.
In that timeframe, we went from newest to most powerful.
How were we able to accomplish this without the EPA, war on drugs, student loans, an income tax, taxing the rich, crippling business regulations, bailouts, quantitative easing, social security, medicare, a military industrial complex, an empire, homeland security, a minimum wage, preemptive wars and fiat money, to name a few?
Thank God we have all these things now and I'm not growing up in such dark times.
Size to grow, Natural Resources, and WWI plus WWII is why.
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