No, you undercut Europe. Including by holding on to slavery much longer than most other industrialized nations.

I think it is approximately correct to say that no industrialized nation holds on to slavery. Slaves are not productive enough in industrial and post-industrial economies.

The point of US civil war was that the industrialized North wanted to rid of slavery and the agricultural South wanted to go on with slave-dependent growing of cotton etc.

Likewise, places where formal abolition of slavery was more recent (e.g. Kingdom of SA and Yemen until 1962, Oman until 1970, etc) are hardly industrial nations.

(Yes, this is not the complete picture and things are not straightforward or simple: compare to slave labor in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, etc, where some of it was used in industrial-type activities, and even R&D, as described by Solzhenitsyn in In The First Circle; however, you could describe these as solutions for war-time economy, and not sustainable.)

I don't see the relevance. The point is that the US did start it's rise to power in much the same way as China: By undercutting the established industrialised base and treating people worse in the interrim. Same with Germany (undercut the British). The position of slavery today has no relevance to that: China thankfully doesn't need slavery to be able to undercut the US.

As well as the other factors posted, the international brain drain also had a lot to do with it. The US didn't hack for secrets, it bought them by importing the brains. And that was fair enough, right?

Yea, we just had the only viable industrial sector after a depression and two world wars...

It astounds me how many American's don't realize this, and instead attribue global dominance to "the American dream" or some crap.

They "don't realize" it because its un-economic. If free trade is Pareto efficient (it makes everyone better off), it makes no sense that America would prosper more from Europe being a burned out husk than from it being a well developed trading partner. At least that's what free-traders tell us: we benefit from China becoming rich.

The U.S. was very prosperous long before World War I and II.

And also, I see that argument and my take away is that the solution to our economic woes is to sabotage the industrial sector of places like China.

Sure, so was Germany, and they still are. Though we can probably attribute a lot of that pre-war dynamism to the abundance of untapped resources: land, water, minerals, etc. - which is about as arbitrary as being the last man standing industrially.

Liberal immigration policy and real opportunity (because of the previous) lead to an influx of people probably above average in their motivation / skills which probably helped a lot too. I wish we'd remember this lesson today...

I'm not trying to discount American culture / ideals. I love living in San Francisco because of this - most of the good of American culture without many of the downsides.

No. The U.S. never imported cheap labour and treated thouse people in ways deemed illegal in parts of its competition at the time.

This is said in the most sarcastic voice imaginable, right?