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Whenever trouble threatens the world, the American dollar strengthens against other currencies. The strength of the dollar reflects the belief amongst investors that the USA is the country in which capitalism is safest. Such interpretations of the strength of business in the USA are common. The comment attributed to Eisenhower's Secretary of Defence that 'what is good for General Motors is good for the United States' may have been a slight misrepresentation of his remarks. The remark was, however, picked up by many as symptomatic of the degree to which capitalism in the USA is unchallenged.

It is indeed the case that most Americans explicitly support a capitalist market system. Opinion polls show that most Americans (69 per cent) are prepared to make sacrifices to defend the free-enterprise system, regard economic freedoms as essential for freedom in general, and are mainly opposed, (74 per cent) to any large-scale government ownership of industry. As Shonfield notes, the USA is one of the few countries in which the word 'capitalism' has no opprobrious connotations. In most Western countries -- and many Eastern European ones -- the practical necessity of using market incentives is widely accepted. In the USA, however, market mechanisms have a degree of moral legitimacy as determinants of the allocation of incomes, resources and investment not commonly found elsewhere. King has argued that government spending in the USA is unusually small by the standards of industrial democracies; government spends a lower proportion of gross national product (GNP) than in any industrial democracy other than Japan. Nationalized industries are almost unknown; government services such as a national health service or insurance have not been implemented in the USA; and the tendency under President Reagan was for government to reduce further its commitment to ameliorate poverty. The free-enterprise system is thus unusually free of government 'interference'.

The reasons for the strength of support for capitalism and hostility to extensive powers for government in the USA have been much discussed. Probably the most popular explanations are rooted in an emphasis on the distinctive history of the USA. Louis Hartz, for example, argues that its unique history has caused the USA to remain anchored to the nineteenth-century liberal traditions of support for democracy, civil liberties and a market economic system in which government plays a limited role. Having no aristocracy, the USA could not support the paternalistic conservatism of such nineteenth-century Europeans as Shaftesbury, Disraeli or Bismarck. As political rights, including the vote, were extended very speedily to nearly all white men in the USA by 1830 the combination which in Hartz's view was crucial for the development of socialism, a simultaneous quest for economic rights and full citizenship (for example, the right to vote) did not affect the USA. Other writers have stressed different factors in the history of the USA tending in the same direction. American wages have been comparatively high, and the working class has been fragmented by ethnic, racial and regional divisions. The opportunities, real or alleged, for individual advancement through geographic social mobility in addition all protected the legitimacy of capitalism by inhibiting challenges to it. European visitors to the USA in the nineteenth century such as Dickens, de Tocqueville and Sombart noted, too, that the American working class was never as distinct from the middle class in terms of culture, dress or consumption patterns as in Europe. Class consciousness, predictably, was therefore lower. . .  

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