There’s a whole host of considerations here.
If you want to look at what created the middle class, you need to consider Britain’s experience as the industrial revolution began. It was the IR that created the middle class, plainly and simply.
The IR was caused by a laissez faire attitude by the government–it was too new for the gov to realize they wanted to regulate it–and by a buildup of savings and the consequent availability of investment and productive capital.
To say the middle class was created by WWII is utterly ludicrous. Much less to say that it was created by government.
One can easily see this because we have always had government throughout recorded history, going back some 5000+ years. If government was the cause of the middle-class, why did the industrial revolution and the middle class appear first in countries that were largely unruled and unregulated–britan and the united states?
We have always had government, we have not always had a populace with enough freedom to do what they liked, a population with rights that the gov was forced to respect. The production of such a society was largely historical accident and unique combinations of historical events. The British got freedom by forcing their king to sign the Magna Carta, the world’s first constitution.
The American experience follows from the similar accident of time and place, of the shores of the US being so very far away from Britain, and the British general laissez faire attitude towards the American colonies brought about by weak British kings for hundreds of years. It was a strong king arriving on the throne, George the 3rd, who tried to bring the american colonies back under crown control that finally fomented revolution.
But, it happened in perfectly the right historical epoch. Had it happened much before, the americans wouldn’t have had military experience such as they received fighting for the British some years before in the French and Indian war, which gave the Americans many experienced military personnel, including George Washington.
Had it happened a generation later, they again would’ve had no military experience. And what’s more, the advances of the industrial revolution would’ve made it harder and harder to secede from Britain, as better arms and ships came about.
Should Britain have had the tech of WWI, who knows whether the US would’ve been able to pull away, much less become a great power.
But, to return to your question, if the government creates the middle class, you must ask why places with the strongest governments still to this day lack a middle class.
The truth is, the free market creates the middle class. Governemnt has never created wealth. It cannot. It produces nothing. All it can do is get in the way of wealth by spinning its spiderwebs of laws. The US is an elephant and it’s taking a long time for the webbing of laws to bind its feet, but other smaller economies are bound much sooner and much easier.
If the gov creates wealth–same thing as saying the gov created the middle class–why did the USSR have no middle class, why did communist China have no middle class. It was only when China de-communized their economy that they began to see rapid gains and investment. And even then, they have only let in a few drops of capitalism, becoming in truth a fascist state, allowing some ownership but with total central control still.
