I'm definitely romanticizing the U.S. quite a bit. At the same time, that romanticization is inspiring (at least to me) and largely true today when you compare us to countries like China, where you have much less control over your future. Also, moving to a country that provides greater freedom and opportunity at the cost of less of a social net and lower taxes will almost definitely self-select for the ambitious.
Slavery also continued in practice in China until at least 1949 [1]
What do you call a US prison farm? [1] Even Wikipedia acknowledges that "the concepts of prison farm and labor camp overlap." Labor camps are even explicitly permitted by the 13th amendment "... which ended slavery, specifically perpetuated the concept of penal servitude – i.e., unfree labor as a punishment for a crime."
There is a difference between political prisoners and criminals. There is a rule of law in the US which means you cannot arbitrarily imprison anyone; there is due process and a trial. That is missing from the Chinese Judicial System which makes it much more akin to Slave Labor.
You are just human. So that means in general you are xenophobic, nationalist, racist and operate on the unstated assumption that you and your fellow nationals are 100X more worthy than any foreigner.
"moving to a country that provides greater freedom and opportunity at the cost of less of a social net and lower taxes will almost definitely self-select for the ambitious"
That's flawed logic.
1. There is no study that stated less social net and lower taxes will definitely self-select for the ambitious.
2. US does not have the lowest tax in the world.
The vast majority of physical and intellectual labor that “built” the United States was performed by free men. I’m not saying there wasn’t slavery, but your assertion is absurd.
"the US will self-select for the ambitious and the inspired and those who desire freedom" this is just hogwash