AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

 

There is no difference in the basic intelligence of the various human populations on earth. Racists will always dispute this equality, claiming superior standing for one ethnicity or another. In my traveling of the world, working with dozens of different peoples, I find what my father always said is true; one human brain works just as well as any other no matter which color container in comes in. How then do we explain the relative advancement of some cultures when compared to others? Modern American culture is starkly different than the basic agrarian economies found in parts of Africa or South America. If it is not the people that are exceptional, yet the contrast in achievement is so evident, what stimulation is it that has spurred the dynamic pace at which Americans develop technology?

America is exceptionally fertile ground for innovative minds to flourish in. It does not matter whether we are talking about immigrants such as Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein or home grown inventors like the Wright brothers this country has fostered an environment perfect for innovation. The founders of our nation included in the declaration of independence from England a long list of grievances including theft by the crown of private property and limitation on commerce without legal recourse. Private property rights and the notion that a person’s ownership of their work product in pursuit of their life, liberty and happiness, and the right to have laws specifically to protect those personal property rights was fundamental to the founding of this country. Constructs in the Constitution prohibiting unreasonable search and seizures without a warrant and in the XIV amendment which guarantees citizens against Federal or state government depriving them of life, liberty or property without due process of law are keystones in the search for understanding Americas prominence.

Henry Ford created his empire and Andrew Carnegie forged the steel industry while Cornelius Vanderbuilt, William Boeing, J P Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were pioneering U. S. industry. Thomas Edison and Donald Douglas along with Glen L. Martin and the Lockheed brothers rose from humble beginnings to industrial dominance. The same drive to innovate and succeed spurred on by the right to keep what you earned encouraged the likes of Jonas Salk and George Washington Carver to invest their resources and creativity in the attempt to improve their own future. The country vaulted forward in front of other nations powered by this kind of entrepreneurship. Ownership of land and the bounty it produced in the hands of private citizens like Carnegie and Weyerheauser was not available in feudal Europe. These same industrialists invested their profit to grow their businesses and employ the youth of the nation who were trying to move off the family farms and into industrial cities. Steam power gave way to internal combustion and the explosion of oil related wealth and opportunities. Diesel engines in the hands of pioneers like John Deere’s decedents turned horse drawn agriculture into vast manufacturing empires whose tractors enabled single farmers to feed thousands of families. Capitalism’s financial rewards protected by the rule of law worked to move technology ahead at a pace never before seen on this earth. Some people today view the industrial revolution and our modern world in a negative light as if things were better before. The same people use the goods and services our technology provides and take the medicines it develops while complaining about the corporate profiteering. Our capitalistic economy is 100% merit based, the profit earned on the manufacture and sale of products provides the incentive to innovate and invest. I work with companies in third world nations because they hire us to build them manufacturing capability so that they too can modernize their societies.

It is sad that our own administration can’t see that our system has worked better than any other to elevate people out of poverty. Their view that the successful have somehow benefitted unfairly at the expense of others is a naïve position completely at odds with the history of nations. America is exceptional President Obama and we are not a colonial nation. Your anti-colonial vendetta against America is misguided and even though you don’t see it we, as a people, are the most generous nation on earth.