Earlier quoted context omitted.
America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were the exploiters.
No it wasn't. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war? If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich? Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA? Native Americans had slaves: > "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric…
Because the North had a diversified, industrialized economy, while the South specialized in cotton production.
But the North never could have diversified in this way if it weren't for the South. First because slave-grown cotton was a major source of capital for the overall US economy - it provided over half of all US export earnings. Second, because the demand for textile factories, meat processing plants, insurance, shippers etc. in the over-specialized South is precisely what created a market for the North to diversify into.
This is on top of the fact that the North itself had slaves for a long time, from initial settlement to abolition many decades later.