The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor. Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this. Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built. But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed. What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important. Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust. The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.