The UK was a real monarchy prior to the WW I.
No, that isn't true. If it were true, then Queen Victoria would have been able to appoint her own Prime Minister and would have kept Disraeli and never had to suffer Gladstone. The powers of the Crown at the turn of the 20th century were no greater in practice than they are today. Real government is exercised by Parliament, and the real executive authority by the Cabinet.
In theory the monarch can veto acts of Parliament and
in theory the government acts on the monarch's behalf, so that we speak of "Her Majesty's government" or "the Royal Navy" or whatever, but this is a power that is never exercised and that all parties know would provoke a constitutional crisis if it were -- probably resulting in the end of the monarchy. The monarch wields, in actual practice, no legislative or executive power, and no judicial power even in theory.
So was Germany, Austria, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, and Italy. All these countries were industrializing rapidly.
Germany was a genuine industrial power. The others on your list generally were not, except Sweden (Russia for example would not become fully industrialized until the 1930s). I already acknowledged Germany as the anomaly; it did have a genuine monarchy (although the German monarch, though holding much more power than the King of England, was far from absolute) but, like other industrial countries, was in transition away from this system. The monarchy would be overthrown at the end of World War I and a genuine lasting democracy established at the end of World War II, after an abortive attempt between the wars.
Monarchy is an institution of agrarian civilization. In an industrialized context, if it survives at all, as it does in many places (England, Sweden, Japan) it is a powerless vestige retained for sentimental purposes. That so many monarchies existed in the early 20th century is because Europe was in transition still from its agrarian past to its modern future.
Monarchies have low tax rates because they have nothing to gain by bribing the populace with their own dollars.
Then perhaps you would like to present a comparison by tax rates in the early 20th century among:
1) Germany, which was a genuine industrial monarchy;
2) Britain, which was an industrial pseudo-monarchy; and
3) France and the United States, which were industrial republics and not monarchies at all, even in pretense.
If you are right, then France and the U.S. should have been taxed at a higher rate than Germany, especially the U.S. which had been a republic for over a hundred years (France only for about half that long, discounting the abortive First Republic).
While you're at it, take a look at historical taxation in Switzerland, which is probably the oldest democratic republic on the planet, and has never even had a monarchy at all.
On the other hand, if I am right that higher taxation is a product of the increased wealth and complexity of industrial society, not of democracy, then we should see all industrialized nations gradually increase their taxation as a percentage of GDP and correspondingly their spending on public services, regardless of type of government. And indeed that is what we do see. It doesn't appear instantaneously upon industrialization, but does grow over time.
Incidentally this growth is not without limit; there is always only so much that the people feel they can afford in terms of public spending. It's just a much higher limit in a rich country than in a poor one.
The United States did not industrialize because of the Civil War. The North was already industrialized.
I would say rather that it was the other way around: the Civil War happened because of industrialization. Because of industrialization, slavery became economically obsolete as well as morally repulsive, and this created an alliance between the Northern industrial and commercial elite and the emancipation movement, both represented by the Republican Party. The quasi-feudal planter elite, which remained locally strong in the South, tried to preserve its privileges, including the privilege of slave ownership, by seceding from the country. The attempt failed. It was a particularly painful part of our transition from agrarian to industrial, but yes, the transition had already begun before all this happened.
Tax increases under democracy are the result of class warfare. It has nothing to do with whether the country is industrialized.
An industrialized economy requires a lot of public spending that a pre-industrial economy does not, including:
1) Paved roads suitable for motorized traffic;
2) Airports, air traffic controllers, etc.;
3) Modern higher education to equip people to do the work an industrial economy needs, plus public spending on scientific research;
4) Regulation of broadcast communication, modern banking, and other complex activities that can't even exist in a pre-industrial economy;
5) Social welfare spending to meet needs that are met by large extended families in a pre-industrial economy;
6) Regulation to prevent a capitalist economy from breaking down, as it tends to do.
The need is seen, and an industrial economy also has the wealth to meet that need. Very little of it has anything to do with class warfare, actually. Most redistribution of wealth occurs through the results of labor law, immigration law, monetary policy, trade policy, and the distribution of the tax burden and its offsets to encourage investment, not by direct transfers of wealth.
Free market capitalism is the only kind there is.
No, it never has existed and never will. A capitalist economy is, by part-definition, an industrial economy, and that requires a high level of government involvement. This was true of the U.S. economy from the late 19th century on. Government subsidized the railroads and the banks, suppressed labor aspirations, encouraged high rates of immigration to provide cheap labor, and encouraged the growth of certain industries through its own purchases, as well as creating the very forms of capitalism itself, such as the limited-liability corporation.
Any other system is a mixture of socialism and capitalism.
Beginning early in the 20th century, government began shifting some of its efforts away from helping the rich to helping the rest of us; thus we got the "Progressive Era," and later the New Deal. In Europe, we saw the incorporation of Marxist demands, in part, into the system. But as noted above, this was not the beginning of government involvement in the economy nor even an increase. It was only a shift in direction, a change in motive, a change from supporting the elite to supporting the people as a whole. But the economy prior to the introduction of these socialist ideals was not "free market." It was still government controlled -- just for different people's benefits.
The employees of the rich would be creating diddly squat if the rich didn't provide them with the capital needed to do the job
Ever read Orwell's
Animal Farm? I recall a passage as the pigs were trying to promote the revolution in which some dumb animal or other, probably a horse, objected, "But Mr. Jones feeds us! If he leaves, who will feed us?" You sound like that.
The rich do not produce capital any more than they do labor. They merely own it. If they did not, the capital would still exist, capital being in essence excess labor, labor over and above what is required to meet immediate needs. Allowing capital to accumulate in private hands is a way of accumulating it, no more.
If real wages have declined and the cost of living increased, it's only because government has multiplied the number of parasites and made it more costly to produce the goods and services we purchase.
Like much of what you're saying here, this is demonstrably untrue. If it were true, we should see a decline in fortunes across the board, from top to bottom, and we do not. At the same time as real wages have declined and the cost of living increased, corporate profits have soared, as has the income of the richest people. It's perfectly clear where the money's gone, and why.
It does indeed come down to government policies. But not the ones you're talking about.
