charliehall: If colonists (or later immigrants) weren’t coming here to practice their religion in peace and avoid discrimination for being a member of a religious or political minority, they were someing here to be free of the economic constraints of living in societies where everyone had a place and if you didn’t like your station in life you had very few means to change it. That’s true even of the many founding fathers who biggest concern was avoiding being drawn and quartered as traitors (as they called the losing side in political disputes back then). Of course many were common criminals but they often had a choice, and “transportation” was often preferred because it offered a chance of a new life.
It’s only in the late 20th century that Europe started to get away from the “manor mentality” of a society in which there was no upward mobility. Socialism largely regulates what you do and what you can become, you become a cog in a machine in which individual initiative is seen as anti-social – and Americans are descended from those who took the initiative to come to a new world to build their own lives.