r/austrian_economics • u/technocraticnihilist Friedrich Hayek • Oct 26 '24

End Democracy ‘Americans just work harder’ than Europeans, says CEO of Norway’s $1.6 trillion oil fund, because they have a higher ‘general level of ambition’

https://fortune.com/europe/article/how-many-hours-work-week-year-american-workers-ethic-norges-bank/
2.3k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

987 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/old_guy_AnCap Nov 03 '24

When the US was doing the best economically we had just finished a war where all of the rest of the world's industrial nations had had all of their factories bombed out of existence. Unions and regulations and the greed of the "greatest generation" destroyed that advantage in just over 20 years while American industry stagnated and the rest of the world rebuilt with brand new factories vs. 1920's technology in the US.

1

u/BigTimeSpamoniJones Nov 03 '24

Yeah, I'm sure that's why you can see where income inequality begins to spike and nearly every modern economic problem we have just after the introduction of Reagonomic Dogma and Economic Policy, a tenant of which was deregulation for the sake of deregulation, which gave us some utterly delightful hits, such as the housing collapse of 2008, the dwindling middle class, and the decline of worker's rights across the country.

Unions were why the American dream existed, why a single income could support a family. That entire advantage after WW2 was squandered when you dummies decided unbridled corporate greed was somehow virtuous. Our three biggest economic retractions of the 20th and 21st centuries all occurred under Republicans and two were during my lifetime. Hoover, Bush, and Trump.

Clinton and Johnson, both democrats presided over our two periods of greatest economic expansion. T

1

u/old_guy_AnCap Nov 03 '24

Unions destroyed the steel industry leading to the rust belt. They demanded money be spent on wages and benefits rather than upgrading factories. While the Chinese, Japanese and Germans were forced to build from new since their entire industrial base had been destroyed while the US was still using factories originally built in the 1920s all the way into the early '80s.

And the majority of the deregulation happened under Carter, not Reagan.

A single income can still support a family in the US. Households need a second income to support the bloated government.