late wrote:Sigh.
As is usually the case, this goes back to the 1800s.
The extremely conservative (real conservatism, not the radical insanity you see today) upper class held all the power. They didn't want to invest in infrastructure, they didn't like change, period.
Yet they lost nearly all the political fights. They could have won all of them. But they'd wait until their failure to act threatened the economy. Their economy was the envy of the world, and they didn't want to kill the goose laying all those golden eggs.
Which British conservatives have forgotten. You see, things keep changing. The first country to do mass education was America. Our educated workforce helped make it possible to steal tons of British jobs.
That's just an example, a successful economy needs careful management. Just take a look at China to see how easy it is to run an economy off the rails.
The class system, dominated by reactionary upper class Brits, keeps making things worse, not better.
That's also true here.
That post is insanely British, what is @ckaihatsu and @late trying to collaborate with that post? The 1800's British economy would be the East India Company... That would be absorbed by the Crown in 1875...
Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies",[10][11] the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s,[12] particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858 when, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Despite frequent government intervention, the company had recurring problems with its finances. The company was dissolved in 1874 . The official government machinery of the British Raj had assumed its governmental functions and absorbed its armies.
the British Government nationalised the company. The British textile industry used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, which increased to 588 million pounds in 1850.In 1791 American cotton production was about 2 million pounds, soaring to 35 million by 1800, half of which was exported. America's cotton plantations were highly efficient and profitable, and able to keep up with demand.[174] The U.S. Civil War created a "cotton famine" that led to increased production in other areas of the world, including European colonies in Africa.[175]The demand for cotton presented an opportunity to planters in the Southern United States, who thought upland cotton would be a profitable crop if a better way could be found to remove the seed. Britain's population grew 280% 1550–1820, while the rest of Western Europe grew 50–80%. Seventy percent of European urbanisation happened in Britain 1750–1800. By 1800, only the Netherlands was more urbanised than Britain. This was only possible because coal, coke, imported cotton, brick and slate had replaced wood, charcoal, flax, peat and thatch.
Cotton was a difficult raw material for Europe to obtain before it was grown on colonial plantations in the Americas. Southerners from the Cotton Belt, particularly those from South Carolina, felt they were harmed directly by having to pay more for imports from Europe. Allegedly, the South was also harmed indirectly because reducing the exportation of British goods to the U.S. would make it difficult for the British to pay for the cotton they imported from the South.[2] The reaction in the South, particularly in South Carolina, led to the Nullification Crisis.[3]
I'll tell you what Government economy has done in China is the Great Famine and you're all essentially absorbed with the same malady.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
- By wat0n
- By Rugoz
- By Bill_Nye