An "atmosphere that encouraged entrepreneurial risk-tasking and capital investment."

[gollygee]

That entrereneurial atmosphere that encouraged capital investment is otherwise known as slavery, and the main capital investment was human beings on forced labor camps, euphemistically known as "plantations."

We didn't become a wealthy country because of magic, Dr. Carson!

His quote: "This country declared its independence in 1776. In less than 100 years, it was the number one economic power in the world. And the reason was because we had an atmosphere that encouraged entrepreneurial risk-taking and capital investment."

http://news.yahoo.com/one-tweet-shows-exactly-ben-045442011.html

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development," notes the Gilder Lehrman Institue of American History. "One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60% of the world's cotton and provided some 70% of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth."

It's really not a coincidence that the U.S.' monumental economic growth during that time span corresponded with the legality of owning human beings for the purpose of forced labor.

As National Geographic points out, there were few sectors of the U.S. economy untouched by slavery. While slaves predominantly worked in agricultural jobs in the antebellum South, they also worked in factories, were domestic servants. and as skilled laborers like "carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, millers, coopers, spinners, and weavers."

Slavery in the southern half of the country helped enable the north's industrialization, forming the basis of the young country's agricultural production.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. The USA's single greatest advantage - and it was a huge one -

was a vast continent whose minerals, timber, and farmlands had never been exploited in the way that those in the Old World had. All that was needed was to kill or displace the tribes living on the land holding the resources, and there was little enough objection to that.

As those resources have been increasingly fully exploited, the "easy wins" of big resource gains for little expenditure have become scarcer and scarcer. Thus a one-time advantage is gone forever, with the wealth from that exploitation now in the hands of the heirs of the Robber Barons. THAT is what discourages "entrepreneurial risk-tasking and capital investment" - no one can benefit from that wealth, who does not already have it, and those who hold vast wealth have no incentive to risk it - period.