The First Enemies of Free Markets Were Conservatives
611 sats \ 4 comments \ @Undisciplined 8 Dec 2023 econ
It turns out that almost everyone is willing to impose their preferences on their fellow men by force.
The First Enemies of Free Markets Were Conservatives, Not Socialists By Ryan McMaken British conservative critics of industrialization invented new terms like "wage slavery," "factory slavery," and "white slavery." Much of the conservatives' terminology and their arguments would later be adopted by socialists.
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269 sats \ 3 replies \ @shado_op 10 Dec 2023
True, and it is a good article, however I would argue the history is more complicated and nuanced from an English working class perspective...
The Enclosure Acts were abused to push most of the previous agricultural poor off the land by removing centuries old "rights". So many were pushed into the Industrial Revolution in the Towns and Cities because there was nowhere else to go. The alternative was starvation. https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-enclosure-acts/
Working conditions were truly horrific. Death and injuries, disease, child labour, pollution, you name it. A common mistake is to believe that the prior agrarian lifestyle was idyllic, it obvs was not, but the grieviances against the new Industrial class were often very genuine. In one coal mine collapse, in 1812, the ages of the dead show several children, youngest being just 8 yrs old. Yes, Eight Years Old... https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lettersandthelamp/sections/the-industrial-revolution-coal-mining-and-the-felling-colliery-disaster/
When people tried to protest, the Authorities were often cruel and callous, as in the infamous Peterloo Massacre. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Hunt
These issues were absolutely, cynically manipulated by Tory politicians of the time, as the article correctly points out. (Opponents of the Industrial Revolution were also themselves often violent).
So it is true that from an economic perspective, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a massive increase in wealth, which eventually found it's way to all of us. Yet it is a mistake to pretend this was a positive experience for the millions of poor and working class people who experienced it. It most definately was not, and we should not lose sight if that fact!
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25 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 10 Dec 2023
Great points. It's hard (maybe impossible) to disentangle all these factors when evaluating major historical events.
There's a perspective, based on revealed preference, that says people preferred the industrial cities, however harsh and ugly they were. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved there. As you point out that misses the contribution of a political act that forced them into the cities. The Enclosure Act is a tricky one to evaluate from a property rights perspective and requires more nuance than it's usually given.
We in developed economies obviously think of that kind of child labor as horrific, but I don't know how to weigh it against other similarly developed economies. If you look around the world today, there are many poor places where kids have to work in horrible conditions or face starvation. That said, however much worse the Industrial Revolution made that should be counted on the cost side of the ledger.
In general, when politicians attempt to accelerate (or decelerate) historical trends, it's going to make the transition more costly than it needed to be.
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257 sats \ 1 reply \ @shado_op 10 Dec 2023
All good points, it's about context. And the historical trends are pretty much inevitable...
I feel the cruelty of some of the key protagonists on the Industrial side fuelled the division their opponents exploited, and plunged the UK into a class war it never really recovered from.
It's interesting to consider the Industrial Revolution in terms of the Digital one. If it's inevitable, we need to make sure it works for us all, and doesnt just create yet another elite power base feeding off everyone else!
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60 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 10 Dec 2023
To me that primarily means keeping their thumbs off the scales. If the powerful don't get to use the state to force everyone else into enriching them, then the natural dynamics will unfold in a way that benefits a wide swath of the population.
The analogy to the industrial revolution would be if people hadn't been forced from land they had legitimate claims to. In that counterfactual, industrialization would have occurred less rapidly and people would have moved to the cities only when it offered them legitimately better opportunities. It's easy to speculate that part of that would be in the form of less horrible working conditions.
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