Democrats love to say that American wealth was built on slavery’s back. Indeed, most recently, Mehdi Hassan explicitly said that slaves, including (especially) Muslim slaves) built America, by which he obviously means America’s current wealth. This is a lie. “The Capitalist Revolution” is responsible for the middle class of citizens and the explosion of wealth in the Western World. Slavery was not.

Image created using AI.

Consider this graph showing GDP since the year 1000 Anno Domini. And consider that if you began the graph as far back as the Bronze Age, it would look the same, with the vast majority of people living at a subsistence level, supporting a tiny number of royals living at their expense. All this changed with the capitalist revolution.

According to Our World In Data:

Economic history is a very simple story. It is a story that has only two parts:

The first part is the very long time in which the average person was very poor and human societies achieved no economic growth to change this.

Incomes remained almost unchanged over a period of several centuries when compared to the increase in incomes over the last 2 centuries. Life too changed remarkably little. What people used as shelter, food, clothing, energy supply, their light source stayed very similar for a very long time. Almost all that ordinary people used and consumed in the 17th century would have been very familiar to people living a thousand or even a couple of thousand years earlier.

All of that changed with the Age of Discovery, which began when Christopher Columbus set sail in search of the Spice Islands. The start of trade in the Atlantic world, coupled with colonization and Mercantilism, led to the creation of a middle class. In 1776, when Adam Smith articulated the theory of Capitalism in his book, The Wealth of Nations, the economies of the Western World were off and running.

To continue from Our World in Data

The second part [of the world’s economic history] is much shorter, it encompasses only the last few generations and is radically different from the first part, it is a time in which the income of the average person grew immensely—from an average of £1051 incomes per person per year increased to over £30,000 a 29-fold increase in prosperity. This means an average person in the UK today has a higher income in two weeks than an average person in the past had in an entire year. Since the total sum of incomes is the total sum of production this also means that the production of the average person in two weeks today is equivalent to the production of the average person in an entire year in the past. There is just one truly important event in the economic history of the world, the onset of economic growth. This is the one transformation that changed everything.

This simple chart, used to illustrate the essay, is striking:

No other economic model has been able to match the growth in wealth and the middle class that capitalism created. By comparison, communism and socialism have both failed by orders of magnitude. Although not shown in this graph, the Soviet Union had a failed economy at the time it imploded in 1991, with a GDP at only a third of the US at the time.

Our World In Data.

But then comes the claim from those seeking reparations for slavery—which ended in the United States in 1865—because they contend that the bulk of American wealth was created on the backs of slaves. The numbers bandied about by House Democrats in 2021 were as high as $14 trillion; that is, virtually two-thirds of our nation’s entire wealth that year.

To call those numbers unmoored from any reality is generous. At the time of the Civil War, only 2% of the population, which is truly a tiny number, owned slaves. Only a few became wealthy from slavery. King Cotton accounted for only 5% of our nation’s gross domestic product.

If there was any truth at all to the outrageous claims of the importance of slavery to our nation’s wealth, the Civil War and the end of slavery should have brought about a depression. And yet the GDP of America grew between 1860 and 1870 as if neither the Civil War nor slavery’s complete end ever occurred.

YEAR         GDP in Millions

1850:          $2,656

1860:          $4,410

1870:          $7,899

Never forget the facts. Capitalism is an unalloyed good. Its track record over centuries is proven, both standing alone and when compared to those nations that have applied communist or socialist economic theory. (As a reminder to those who would point to Europe at its peak in the post-WWII years, Europe’s socialism was never real; instead, America subsidized all of Europe’s socialist policies.) And lastly, slavery happened under capitalism; it was not caused by it nor did it have any impact upon it once outlawed.

Now go out and defeat communism for the good of the Western world.