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Hoo boy!

Ping for later reading

I don't have access to the literature here at work, but in Ayn Rand's essays on Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, there are footnotes on some of the essays with information on the real mortality rate of children working in factories in the 1890s. You'd need to find that book and trace those footnotes, though.

The Birth of Plenty:
How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created
by William Bernstein

Many people often speak of the "dangers" of capitalism - unsafe working conditions, little kids working, too many hours in a week, low wages, monotonous work, no health care. This is really the big argument against laissez-faire.

Imagine how things changed between primarily agrarian societies, with its wall to wall health care, no child labor, short work week, widespread wealth -- and industrial societies.

Just a little joke to illustrate a point. :') The medieval Black Plague led to mechanization due to the labor shortage; industrialization led to urban growth, which necessitated colonization to avoid (as it was thought) starvation and overpopulation; waste products from one industry sometimes wound up as products in a new industry; growth and change became commonplace.

Farming is still hard work, but engines made mechanized agriculture possible, and what is now the US has gone from a 100 per cent agrarian society four centuries ago to at least 98 per cent non-agrarian. Agricultural surplus is the basis for civilization. That probably explains why the airbrained hippies from the 60s wanted to get rid of industrialization, and their airbrained older versions want to get rid of its trappings. Getting rid of personal transportation (for example) and internal combustion requires labor-intensive farming. Look, everybody, 100 per cent employment. We'd put a hammer and sickle on the flag to emphasize that everyone's now living in the workers' paradise, but didn't want to be obvious about it.

Now, it is obvious why such conditions existed after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and FDR's presidency...

Hawley-Smoot passed in 1930, and contributed to an ongoing disaster which began with the upheaval in WWI. It's clear that the post-WWI pubbie presidents weren't laissez-faire at all, or they wouldn't have tried to "protect" everyone, including by suddenly increasing reserve requirements in the banking system, leading to the bursting of the stock bubble and the 1929 stock market crash. And FDR doubled 'em in 1937. Pitchfork Pat wants to return to all that.

What other "horrors" does unrestricted business and laissez-faire economics supposedly bring?

Free trade, oh, no, shiver me timbers. OTOH, loss of control over major resources, including in particular the food supply, but more obviously the energy supply, is a consequence (and not necessarily temporary; seldom do governments coexist with a political vacuum) of laissez-faire politics. The Luddites want to eliminate farm subsidies (but only when they are not in political control; this too can change) in pursuit of some kind of back to the land and return to a politically correct family farm which has never existed. The laissez-fairies want to eliminate farm subsidies in order to further enrich themselves, while loftily claiming it is to restore a market economy which has never been lost.

bump for later- There is an interesting economic and historical disconnect in the premise behind the thread.