Story Idea: A bunch of Lolberts teleported into a alternate reality where the “Free Market” remained during the Great Depression. That’ll show those commies.
Story Idea: A bunch of Lolberts teleported into a alternate reality where the “Free Market” remained during the Great Depression. That’ll show those commies.
The entire system was cracking up at the seams. Between the Dust Bowl and the industrial crash, the mass migrations and the riots, there was no "Free Market" in any modern sense. People were just scrambling around to survive as the engines of commerce collapsed.
Maybe we'd get a KMT/CCP style conflict where the KMT wins, and the US reinvents itself as a full blown WASP theocracy. Maybe you get real balkinization, and the interior cracks up into distinct geopolitical regions. Maybe you end up with a gruesome civil war and mass-depopulation, as people flee a continent in decline (not unlike Europe in 18th century). But you don't just get "American Capitalism Minus Social Security". You get something more in line with the post-USSR crack-up or the cannibalized remains of the Ottoman Empire.
It's not going to be anything a Libertarian recognizes. Not a Jennifer Government style world, but a modern-day Bangladesh/India/Pakistan or shattered mix of Latin American states where ultra-capitalist Honduras and the socialist Nicaraguans / Zapatistas are within a day's travel of one another.
People seem to forget that as commercial capital developed and new colonial markets were opened, Britain didn't become some like Rayndian utopia of industrial development. They turned all the subsistence farmers and peasants into proles. Manchester's life expectancy was like 37 for proles and the under 15 death rate was close to 30%.
Industrial capital cannot function without child labor, right now that labor is just done overseas because the development of transportation infrastructure has allowed for rapid turnover of commodities no matter where they're built (and it's safer to exploit intentionally de industrialized and devastated countries because the contradictions are not as hightened).
The collapse of the USSR saved capitalism from a collapse not unlike the one FDR saved it from. There were no new markets to exploit and Eastern Europe was essentially purposefully de industrialized to create a new market and serve as a reserve labor army against the westerners. As that process begins to equalize, and no new markets open up/China closes down existing markets (see Africa), western capitalism will be in for another crisis. One that will probably see an attempt (in the core) to convert a lot of service workers and commercial workers into productive workers.