How so? If I saw people getting rich because they were exploiting free labor, it would piss me the h3ll off! I would be quite angry and resentful about it, and i'm not the only one.
Ever hear Union people or just ordinary workers complain about slave labor in the third world, or H-1B visas?
Why wouldn't John Brown, who actually had to work for a living, not be resentful about his main economic competitors getting rich off of not only free labor, but labor which he consider to be evil and immoral?
Putting myself in his shoes, it would make me furious.
Distorted in so many ways. Brown wanted to get higher prices for the farmers from the woolen manufacturers.
Yes, he tried to organize Massachusetts wool merchants to regulate grades of wool so as to command a better price for the best quality and such. The Massachusetts producers were happy enough with the prices they were getting, and didn't see the need to buy in to his more complicated grading system.
Most of them weren't truly rich and I don't see that any of them was especially active in the wool trade.
The ringleaders of his funding efforts weren't wool merchants, but I dare say he wouldn't have made their acquaintance had he stayed down in Kansas instead of Massachusetts. Why was he in Massachusetts? To organize the wool merchants there.
It wasn't free labor that John Brown was angry about. Are you really so dim? Why do you keep talking about "free labor" when slavery was the issue?
Why was he in Massachusetts? To organize the wool merchants there.
Brown tried his hand as a wool merchant trying to organize a better deal for the farmers. That involved merchants pooling their efforts but that was a means to an end, not a goal in itself. Brown's wool merchant days in Western Massachusetts came before his time in Kansas. He went back to Massachusetts later to raise money. It is true that he secretly got funds from Amos Lawrence, a wealthy manufacturer involved in the woolen business, but most of those who backed him were not wealthy industrialists.
There's usually a money angle when you look for it.
You have gotten the Marxist theory of economic determinism down very well. But your view contradicts itself and is untenable. What you may not realize is that the same unmasking of the motives of people you disapprove of can be applied to your own motives and the motives of those you do approve of. If it's all about money and morality is a sham, then it's really all about power and force. Your idea that moral positions are just facades for the desire for money also applies to the legalistic view you claim to support. For if morality is a sham, what supports the law except brute force?