América

Históriador econômico Robert Higgs sobre seu país:

It would be very easy to conclude that the American people have lost their way, but I have studied history enough to know that they never really found their way -- unless one regards the great evils of every preceding age as unimportant. But they were not unimportant. There simply was no golden age, of liberty or anything else.When private enterprise was freest, in the 1840s and 1850s, slavery was still in place. When slavery was abolished in the wake of a horrifying war, blacks were still treated with gross injustice and the plains Indians were slaughtered, brutalized, cheated, and herded onto reservations to make way for the railroads, miners, and farmers. When the gold standard was being enacted into law in 1900, the U.S. armed forces were slaughtering the recently "liberated" Filipinos, confining them in concentration camps, burning their villages, and using water-boarding to extract information from them.
And so it went -- no golden ages, just the endless struggle of the decent few to reveal, denounce, and stop the evils carried out or endorsed by the indecent many, while the latter were always well represented by those who held the controlling positions in the country's governments at every level.