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
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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
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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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