What was America like before Social Security?
“The civilization of the past hundred years,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said upon signing the Social Security Act of 1935, “with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure.” [1] This was an inexcusably ahistorical claim. The past hundred years (1835-1935) had done more to relieve poverty and increase life’s security than any prior century in human history.
- For the first time in history, a people’s standard of living increased substantially, generation after generation. US GDP per capita more than quadrupled, growing from $1,287 in 1820 to $5,307 a century later (1990 dollars). [2]
- US life expectancy increased from under forty years in 1850 to almost sixty in 1930. [3]
- Americans were earning more but working less. Annual work hours plummeted from 3,069 in 1870 to 2,368 in 1929. [4]
- Population exploded from 5,308,483 in 1800 to 123,076,741 in 1930. [5]
Meanwhile, the existential circumstances of life were improving by the day. Between 1835 and 1935, medicine advanced (anesthesia, antiseptics, insulin, penicillin, and pasteurization were all developed during this era, along with vast improvements in sanitation), transportation was revolutionized (the internal combustion engine made possible trucks, cars, tractors, and airplanes, while steam trains became vastly safer thanks to the development of the air brake), new means of communication connected the world (telegraph, telephone, radio), and home life saw the introduction of electricity, incandescent lighting, the sewing machine, the washing machine, running water, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and a whole lot else.
What was happening? The commercial society provided people with an unprecedented degree of freedom to produce and incentive to produce. Anyone with an idea for how to do things better was free to give it a try. And if he succeeded? The rewards were his to enjoy.
Now, to be sure, life was still hard. It had always been hard. But it was better than it had ever been and it was getting even better faster than it ever had, as free individuals lifted themselves out of poverty and into prosperity. That is the basic undeniable fact that any discussion of the challenges of industrialization has to start with: industrialization had radically improved human life and was continuing to improve it. It didn’t create the problem of poverty—it was solving the problem of poverty.
But pre-capitalism’s legacy of poverty could not be erased overnight, and so the entitlement statists were able to point to the remaining pockets of poverty and blame them on the commercial society.
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