[bjlorenzen]

“Give me liberty or give me death” were founding words of our country. If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

[krapp]

>If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.

[fzeroracer]

Where was our commitment to liberty and freedom for the Black people we made slaves? The Irish we discriminated against? The Japanese we locked up in concentration camps? The natives we killed and stole their land from?

'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.

[datameta]

I'm curious by what metric you perceive we've been #1. The fact that we have the largest prison population and per-capita incarceration rate comes to my mind most readily.

[tsimionescu]

Slavery, abundant natural resources, a commitment to not listening to 'sound economic policy' of its times (which would have had the colonies be strictly agrarian, shipping raw cotton to the English industry - look at Egypt and India for how well that worked out), genocide of the indigenous population, many years of exerting soft and hard power to control the continent, etc.

'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.