Resolved: Capitalism Has Been The Exclusive Liberator From Grinding Poverty

I congratulate my opponent on a very innovative way of attempting to shift in an ingenious—dare I say, Fabian?—manner from the assertion that is interesting to most people, that capitalism does or does not advance the material interests of the poor in absolute terms, into a nebulous utopian notion where he rejects such basic necessities as nutrition and clean water, as evidenced by where he uses Vietnam as some sort of example of a society which had some point in the indefinite past overcame poverty. As my opponent specified neither time period nor provided a source, he made my research difficult, but nevertheless, I looked at ALL of Vietnam`s postwar history to try and find an example of that people breaking out of absolute poverty, and amazingly, I found it!https://worldview.stratfor.com...Poverty is now at an all time low of 17%. Back to your counter examples:1. I won`t bother refuting your theory (not actually a refutation, see the following) of the US` decline in poverty as a result of Roosevelt, especially since poverty was dealt a gigantic blow from 1850 to 1900, long before wage laws were ever instituted, for example. Capitalism and free trade were already doing away with bad wages, despite all the rich's oppressions. That leads to an interesting observation. In capitalism, the participants of whom do not by the way have a goal of enriching one another but rather themselves, they end up enriching their neighbor at the same time. Conversely, communism, which has the aim of enriching one`s neighbor or community, has failed.My sources:https://babel.hathitrust.org...https://usa.usembassy.de...Wages exploded over this period, and that is inflation adjusted as curiously the dollar hardly changed in value over that period. Let`s compare Soviet outcomes over their history. As Soviet poverty data from this period is lacking, let`s look at something really basic, like nutrition. https://en.wikipedia.org...Hmm, not great. Now, re: my opponent`s citation of Holland as an example of free trade as though it were a counterexample, he would have seen in my previous article that I myself had cited Holland as an example of free trade and pointed out that by the graphic I cited in the beginnning, GDP/capita in 1800 was highest in Holland, and by a long shot. But in the article I cited, the iron summary of the matter remains the following: "In spite of the considerable amount of internal and external trade that developed in and among the European powers between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, very little of it could be characterized as “free trade.” Internal and external markets were highly controlled and regulated throughout Europe with a few exceptions (Holland)" Re: The UK`s economic success. Note my opponent first said he would group my French, British, and German examples as Europe and refute them that way, but then fell back to the UK individually. Why did he that, I query? It`s quite easy to attribute the UK`s success to imperialism, indeed, their imperialist activities were the most widespread and most intense. But what of Belgium? The densely populated yet globally impotent little country with not a single overseas colony until 1885 that industralized on par with Britain? I suspend any further investigation on Britain on my part on the basis of a lack of need and in the interest of a lack of space.From "The History of Belgium" wikipedia article, discussing France`s 1795 annexation of Belgium"France promoted commerce and capitalism, paving the way for the ascent of the bourgeoisie and the rapid growth of manufacturing and mining. In economics, therefore, the nobility declined while the middle class Belgian entrepreneurs flourished because of their inclusion in a large market, paving the way for Belgium's leadership role after 1815 in the Industrial Revolution on the Continent." This section quotes two books. Well, there`s the tried and true recipe for ending poverty at work again. Commerce and capitalism. Back to the question of Argentina, what did Argentina do to so greatly outpace its peers?"Prior to 1914 a growth strategy based on openness to capital inflows (note: my bolding), frontier expansion, and the strong pursuit of comparative advantage based on primary exports carried the country to very high levels of income per capita income." Now, on to Argentina`s trade policy: "(Shortened to save space) Suppose also that, imports in the initially open economy would be 40% of GDP (the figure last seen in Argentina circa 1910, the last date when both it and the rest of the world were close to fully open). Let us assume that intermediate inputs account for 50% of imports, and capital goods account for 25% the roughly stable figures seen in decades of historical data in Argentina (Berlinski 2003). Using the Estevadeordal and Taylor (2013) standard open-economy neoclassical model, we could conclude that the trade taxes would lower GDP by roughly 0.200 log points or 20% in the long run steady state, given the import shares as above. Two thirds of this would arise due to higher costs of intermediates (an effect analogous to a negative productivity shock) and one third would arise from the higher cost of capital goods (an effect analogous to a negative savings rate shock). These are quantitatively large effects when the full gap to be explained is 1.000 log points, since they explain one fifth of Argentina’s decline"In short, Argentina`s protectionism along with the developed world's. rather than spurring an "infant industry", killed the golden goose and undid its progress. But when free trade was around, Argentina was right there with Britain, the USA, and the settler nations. Free trade aided the developing nation of Argentina, and protectionism was its undoing. The time-tested remedy of capitalism and free trade strikes again. Source: http://www.nber.org...With relation to the absolute necessity of capitalism to cause the Industrial Revolution, I submit that we will only ever have inductive means to reach such a conclusion, which I am attempting to use. It will forever be impossible to rule out all the myriad hypothetical economic systems as means of liberating the poor, and thus impossible to show that capitalism is a necessary condition. Good thing I did not do that. I only stated in the title that "Capitalism has been the exclusive liberator from grinding poverty" and in the challenge that "That the only cases in which the masses have escaped the kind of grinding poverty that the overwhelming majority of people have been in since the dawn of time, which includes lack of access to clean water, lack of adequate nutrition, and so on so forth, have been when they have had capitalism and largely free trade." I never proposed to prove more than this.But since you brought up the USSR as a socialist state, and by my inference, your best example, let`s review the Soviet Union`s final track record. "Komsomolskaya Pravda, the party's youth newspaper, blames the system (of which it is a part) as it points out that before the 1917 revolution, Russia ranked seventh in the world in per capita consumption and now is 77th -- "just after South Africa but ahead of Romania." "If we compare the quality of life in the developed countries with our own," the paper said, "we have to admit that from the viewpoint of civilized, developed society the overwhelming majority of the population of our country lives below the poverty line."https://www.washingtonpost.com...In short, the Soviet Union, which you gave as an example of a socialist country, by its own admission, failed to eliminate poverty. You`ll need another example to dispute the resolution. Now my space is no more.