Japan and Germany didn't have liberal policies prior to the war, FD, but they rivalled Mother and Uncle in production.
Japan had labour camps and forced Asian labour. Germany had entire populations of indentured labourers and millions in concentration camps. They were critical to Nazi economic planning.
The USSR then had its gulag archipelago. Hard to say if this helped the Soviets reach their production targets, but as Germany and Japan surpassed Mother before the war, the USSR overtook her after it. As Mother lost her colonies, the Soviets expanded west, occupying all of Eastern and Eastern Central Europe.
Let's face it, the only way Mother could hold hegemony was with her colonies. After the war, US foreign policy and independence movements saw the end to that. The Soviets and Americans divided influence in the colonies (and their markets) between them.
WWII was a war over all these things. The real victors of WWII were the Soviets, as every schoolboy knows. Soviet troops fought off the Germans with their own guns aimed at their backs, preventing their retreat.
Freedom of labour might be a value we all hold, but when you're an Alpha, you use slaves.
Quote:Slavery destroys any incentive on the part of the slave or the slave owner. A slave gets no benefit from working harder or innovating. They spend their life trying to do just enough work to avoid punishment
Slavery destroys incentive? The same applies to wage-labour. See Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England as a case in point.
We might have progressed, but there's a world outside Mother England.
Quote:It was a visiting yankee who came up with a key invention for cotton ginning in the southern US. He saw a slave toiling away, and his natural instinct was to come up with a machine to reduce the physical burden of the work.
Ah, the liberal instincts of the Yankee inventor. Ah, the reactionary instincts of the Deep South, who waged a civil war to keep their slaves.
Quote:Back in Europe, when the poor were given the opportunity to improve their lot in life through hard work, a lot of them ended up working harder than slaves elsewhere in the world.
Workers during the industrial revolution might have worked harder than slaves because they had 12 hour shifts, 6 and a half days a week. Factory workers don't "improve their lot" by working harder, the pace of machines determine output. It was only with unionisation that workers were able to sit down with bosses and discuss productivity, then innovate to improve their own performance. This, of course, came with conditions.
In the colonies, indentured labourers were no more than slaves. They
could improve output on plantations by working harder, but the only incentive was to avoid the whip of the overseer.
The more sensible way to incentivise workers would have been to pay per bushel or pound, but the colonies didn't work like that. There was no way to improve your lot by working harder. You worked or you got sent home - with no money for the ticket and no way of getting back. The American railroads were built in similar conditions by Chinese coolies.
The very idea of improving your lot by working harder was pushed by the Nazis with the ironic concentration camp greeting: arbeit macht frei.
Freedom, as inmates quickly found out, meant death.
These slave conditions delivered the goods. Without a doubt, they allowed Mother and Amerika and the Huns and Soviets to lift output and become economically dominant. Slaves produce wealth, just not for themselves.
I'd be interested to read a study on the comparative output of free labour - i.e, workers who are able to leave when they choose.
You haven't provided that, FD. So far, you've merely broadcast the ideology.
Freeeedom, innit.