Английский язык в экономике, бухучете и банковско-финансовой деятельности

Only in the 1980s was the United States overtaken by countries such as West Germany and Japan, and even then only by the measurement of gnp per capita at exchange rates favorable to the deutsche mark and yen. By any other index of quality of life, the American standard of living was still the highest in the world.

If this outcome of unique affluence is clear, the ideas and policies behind it remain open to interpretation. How much did American economic success derive from laissez-faire ideas and policies, how much from governmental intervention? How much did it stem from neither of these but from the simple fact of a wealthy, isolated, and sparsely inhabited continent ready for exploitation? Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the early policies can be characterized as laissez-faire, then how much of the letting alone originated in the reasoning of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, how much in the practical impossibility of effective public administration over a far-flung country?

In tracing the ideas behind American economic policies, the colonial period is the proper starting place.

As the historian Carl Degler once remarked, «Capitalism came in the first ships.» The English settlers of North America brought with them clear convictions about the nature of sovereignty and the rights of property. These ideas, and the resulting policies, then interacted with the circumstances of a rich and underpopulated continent to set the context of economic activity.

During most of the colonial period, the hand of government lay lightly on the economy. This was true even allowing for such exceptions as the harshness of Puritan rule in early New England, the heavy taxation of Chesapeake tobacco by the English Crown, and the odious institution of slavery. When the colonists did revolt in 1775, it was in large measure against Britain’s new revenue policies of the 1760s and 1770s, which conveyed to American shores a fresh corps of administrative officials.

This new regime brought taxation without representation, together with other violations of the «rights of Englishmen.»

The intellectual contours of the American Revolution suggest that the United States was born in a broad outburst of anti-authoritarianism that transcended any temporary disaffection from George III, the British monarch.