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Feb. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:24
79 The Industrial Revolution

Turning the world around one 12-hour day at a time (or, Look - the children - they liiiiive!)

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Time Text
Good morning everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is Wednesday, February the 3rd, 2006.
Eight o'clock in the morning.
I'm heading in a little early.
I have a monster three-hour demonstration and meeting today with the BC Ministry of Education.
A few things to get ready.
So I woke up and the list began rolling through my head of everything I needed to get done.
So I thought, what the heck, let's get up and get it done.
So I had a very wonderful email yesterday from a young gentleman who had some comments about my podcast.
And, you know, I was very moved.
I mean, it was just a wonderful email, and thanks so much for sending it.
I mean, that's all the payment I'm looking for, is, you know, to help people to whatever degree that I can, to clarify their thinking.
And the reason that that's important is not because there's any prize for clear thinking, other than joy, happiness, and a rich and wonderful life.
If I can do any part to spread that a tiny bit.
I mean, my day is complete and wonderful, and thank you so much.
It means the world to me to hear that I've helped in any way.
And as a sort of periphery note, this young gentleman had a question, or I guess a question which I've heard before, and if you're at all interested in the history of freedom, you've doubtless heard before as well.
Which is the question or the objection regarding the free market, which has been very nicely set up by those in power, which is to say that the problem with the free market is that it results in this Dickensian nightmare of children working twelve hours a day, and people working down the mines with no safety
I mean, all of this sort of stuff, right?
So the idea is that the free market came along and it had some beneficial aspects, but it was a horror particularly to the poor and the uninformed, and therefore government had to come along to ameliorate the worst aspects of the free market, which is why you get regulation and so on and so on.
I mean, it's one of these things that, you know, like many things in life, it's superficially true when you just sort of look at the propaganda, right?
I mean, that's something that's sort of important to recognize.
You know, whenever you're looking at a very broad historical conclusion, what you need to do is you need to sort of say, okay, well, who would benefit from this particular philosophical perspective or approach?
And that doesn't mean that it's false, that the proposition that's put forward, but it's just important to understand the motivation of what's going on.
So, for instance, religion was highly threatened by the rise of the free market, by the rise of capitalism, because, you know, when people are productive and have more chance to survive and aren't as miserable, and especially when they're out of the country and in the city, You know, it's much harder for religion to prosper, and sort of as societies get wealthier, with the exception of the U.S.
at the moment, which we can get into another time, but as societies get wealthier, they generally become less religious.
And so religion, you know, had a terrible time of it with the rise of the free market, which of course is why religion for almost entire human history has actively prevented the free market.
Religion, just for those who don't know, and I'm talking mostly about Christianity in the West, Organized religion has opposed just about every single major advance in the human condition.
I mean, it's just insane how much religion sets itself against any improvement in the human condition, which of course is perfectly natural for the system of thought, right?
I mean, if people are happy, they're not going to need religion.
If people can think clearly, they're not going to need a priest.
So, it's down to... I mean, obviously, it's the major things, right?
The advance of psychology, the advance of understanding of child abuse, the advance of, in particular, interest.
Interest, which we'll talk about in a few minutes, was specifically banned by the Catholic Church, and of course it was the schism within the Catholic Church, and Judaism, of course, which was one of the central aspects that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, Stimulating the aggregation of capital through the allowance of interest, but... I mean, just about every single major advance in... It's that anesthetic!
I mean, unbelievably, anesthetic was considered to be evil and a sin by the Catholic Church.
Why?
Because God put your pain center there for a reason, and To interfere with God's plan would be just wrong, right?
So, I mean, I won't get into all of this.
That could be another podcast.
But, you know, when you look at the stories that come out about the Industrial Revolution, the first thing you want to do is say, okay, well, who lost in the transaction of freedom, right?
Obviously, it's repressive and irrational systems that lose when the free market comes along.
And so you want to sort of trace the origins of the stories about the Industrial Revolution back to these sorts of agencies to figure out what it is that they're trying to do.
And again, I'm not saying there's any cabal of whiteboarding evil folks with thin little mustaches who are rubbing their hands together in miserly glee and plotting the downfall of the free market.
It's just that all human beings have an instinct for The totalitarianism for a dictatorship, right?
Poor, uneducated parents don't go to a bully school and figure out every step that they need to do to destroy their children's self-esteem.
It just kind of happens naturally.
It's an instinct that we have, which is activated in times of suffering and want.
And we can get into that, of course, another time as well.
You know, the first thing you want to do with the Industrial Revolution, and the second, of course, with the Industrial Revolution is, well, what is the other major social institution that had to find a role for itself once it was not centrally bound up in both the protection of monopolies and the charitable organizations?
I mean, the welfare state is just the latest In the history of it, Spenumland was the same kind of welfare system that was set up in England, I think, in the 18th century, which bankrupted all of the local authorities, because as soon as you paid people not to work, they stopped working.
I mean, this is the Roman Empire, right?
What do the masses need?
Bread and circuses, so give them some cheap welfare and some You know, Christians and lions in an amphitheater, and they're happy as pigs in... pigs in... in shite!
So, you know, this idea that the state takes care of the poor, I mean, sort of one of the central justifications for the existence of the state was to protect monopoly.
That was sort of the dark side, right?
So to protect the aristocracy, to wage war, to Enslave the peasants to enforce the rule, especially, and this is particularly true in the times where armed combat was the major thing.
And, you know, now nuclear weapons, like one guy can rule a country, right, if he's got his finger on the button.
But back then, you know, young, young, hale and hearty peasant lads could have stormed and killed the the noble with, you know, relative ease compared to what it would take now.
And so they really had to have a lot of militia and a lot of sort of mind control through religious indoctrination in order to avoid this, you know, the peasants are revolting kind of scenario.
And so once the Industrial Revolution came along, the two major entities that were threatened were the church and the state, right?
I mean, which was the dominant form of Indoctrination and coercion, in fact the only, pretty much the only form throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and of course all the way back through human history.
So, you know, it's just important to understand what social agencies were threatened by the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and what role it was that they had to find for themselves, you know, their sort of irrational and brutal structures within this sort of realm of new freedom.
So, of course, what happens is you begin to get the continuation of the bigotry of the greedy rich man, I mean, Christianity has always hated the rich man, and this goes probably all the way back to its founding as a slave religion, where those who owned you were much richer than you, of course, and so there's that sort of basic reaction.
And, of course, those who became rich in predatory societies generally were the most brutal, right?
I mean, it wasn't the nice guys who did really well in the ancient Roman business world, right?
It was those who were able to bribe the senators and get the legislation passed their way that they wanted, which is sort of what's happening now, right?
Wherever you have an increase in state power, you have a widening of the division between rich and poor.
And we can also get into that in another podcast as well.
But if you look at the statistics, I mean, at the moment, the gap between rich and poor is widening enormously.
And, of course, because everybody's corrupt and idiotic in the media, they blame this on corporations.
And the corporations are the ones who are savaging us, right?
The fact that they rely on the armed might of the state, which is taken from citizens through force, is somehow not so important.
But, you know, the people we really have to worry about is not the military or the police, but, you know, Kmart.
Those are the really dangerous agents within society.
I'm sorry, I can't say it with a straight face.
I just think it's so obviously funny that It just shows the degree of corruption that's in the public sphere, particularly in the realm of the media and of those media critics in particular, right?
So, the Church resurrected the bigotry of the rich man being evil and the capitalist, and the Church suddenly found all this sympathy for the children, right?
I mean, the Church and children is a bloody, sexually predatory relationship that goes all the way back to the founding of the Church.
To some degree, it's possible to logically look at Christianity and other of religious organizations as simply pedophilia rings in big hats.
And, you know, that's something that is just so obvious that has sort of come to light more often now.
But if you talk to most religious people who are honest with you, I mean, the level of sexual tension and sexual predation within the church is astonishing, right?
And, well, I say it's not astonishing.
It's high to the uninitiated.
It's completely understandable once you realize the sort of sick fantasies that religion represents.
And the fact that you need to brutalize children as much as possible to get them to become religious, you know, there is this chain of pedophilia within the church and within all churches that is just so common that, again, it's a sort of pedophilia ring with, you know, big hats and droning voices.
So, you know, the fact that the church begins to have all of this concern for the children is kind of funny, right?
I mean, the idea that maybe it just didn't like the fact that they weren't as available and accessible as they used to be.
But it is sort of funny the degree of sympathy that they found for the children.
And, of course, the state had to figure out what on earth it was going to do with the rise of the free market, because society was organizing itself very well, thank you very much, in the absence of the state.
In fact, it began to be pretty clear to people that it was a state that had kept everybody at starvation levels for the past 1,500 years, and therefore the state had to find a role for itself.
You know, in combination with the church talking about the evil excesses of capitalism, the state began to, you know, take its role as the regulator, and then it began to take its role as the educator, and then it began to take its role as the creator of monopolies, and, you know, sort of began to creep back, you know, after it suffered this body blow in the West of the rise of freedom and the free market, then it began to sort of reform and reconciliate itself as a sort of socially mediating agency.
And, of course, it required a couple of generations, because those who were first freed In the 18th century, for a variety of reasons which we can get into, they directly remembered what the state was all about, and so they had to wait for a couple of generations.
The state shrunk pretty radically.
It had to wait for a couple of generations for it to start resuming.
About a generation and a half, actually, usually, is what it takes for it to start resuming its growth.
A generation and a half is kind of common for the resurrection of a social evil.
After World War II, you get them a little bit in Korea, and a lot of those were continuing U.S.
servicemen and women, but you don't get Vietnam until a generation and a half afterwards, and then a generation and a half after Vietnam you get 9-11 and the War on Terror, because, you know, the people who've directly experienced it, you know, they know what it's all about.
You can't fool them.
But, you know, the people who haven't, you know, they, of course, after the First World War, it's a generation and a half, both for the replenishment of the young, and also because, you know, they just don't recall how stupid and pathetic and destructive and violent and evil war is.
So, you know, it takes a while to indoctrinate the kids back into being positive about something that's such a nightmare.
So, that's sort of my major caution when talking or thinking about the Industrial Revolution, is to understand the social agencies of historical power that were threatened by the rise of freedom.
And their response was, as it generally is with manipulative and destructive social agencies, it's pure genius in terms of making people frightened of what it is that is saving them.
That's what you want to do, right?
You want to make people frightened of freedom.
You want to make people frightened of wealth.
You want to make people frightened of opportunity.
So that you can continue to control them and bully them and destroy their children's minds and, you know, continue to prey upon, you know, the state and the church are both the murderers of the mind and the flies that feast upon the mind's decay, right?
I mean, they slaughter the mind, usually very young, and they do this through religious indoctrination and public school education.
And then when the mind is dead they feast upon the knee-jerk patriotism and reaction like flies on a corpse.
They feed on that and so that's sort of the mental image that I have and I think it's pretty accurate based on evidence of how these agencies operate.
So let's just talk a little bit about the conditions within the Within the Industrial Revolution, so that you get a stronger understanding of, you know, rather than comparing it to now, right?
I mean, it's what people always do.
It's like, well, now, children go to school and they don't have to have jobs until they're teenagers.
And then, you know, children were sent down the mines for 12 hours a day.
And of course, I mean, who would want that?
I mean, nobody!
So, you know, given that human beings now are the same as human beings back then, in terms of psychology, we can assume that the children back then were relatively loved by their parents, I mean, relative to today, and that if it were possible for the children not to have to work, Then, the parents would have been more than happy to put them into school.
I mean, if you look at especially immigrant cultures within, say, North America, I mean, all the parents want their children to do well, and all the parents want their children to get educated and have a better life.
So, of course, the question is, well, why didn't these people do it?
The other question to ask is, you know, why were they down the mines?
Why were they coming to the cities, right?
I mean, the Industrial Revolution was primarily an urban phenomenon.
I mean, it was It was fueled by the rise in food production that occurred throughout the mid-to-late Middle Ages.
So you can't have cities, of course, without excess food production, because cities are hugely net-consumptuous.
They consume much more food than they produce, of course.
So without the rise in agricultural efficiency, you can't have cities.
So then the question is, of course, well, why Why did everybody leave the country and the farms and come to the city?
That's sort of an important question.
I mean, there certainly weren't medieval death squads And kicking down the doors of farms in the 18th century and dragging everybody to the cities and throwing them down the mines and so on.
So, you know, it's important to understand that the Industrial Revolution was the result of the mass choices of individuals who had, for the first time in history, been freed to act in their own best interest.
Right?
I mean, and there's, you know, the very, very brief history of what happened was that, you know, with the rise of, after Magna Carta, which, I mean, although it gave more power to the nobles than were previously existed, there were some property rights in land that began.
The problem with land in the Middle Ages was always the division of land among the sons, right?
The premier janitor was the concept within most of the West that the eldest son got the land and then the eldest son would sort of have to provide for the other sons and all the other sons would have to go into the clergy or the military as the two sort of options prior to the rise of the business class.
So land was continually getting subdivided and subdivided and subdivided.
And then one of the things that happened was, I mean, the Black Death, right, sort of came in successive ways from, I think, the 13th to the 16th century.
And what it did was it raised the price of labor, right, because you had millions upon millions of people just dropping like flies through this plague.
And so it raised the price of labor and therefore the serfs became more valuable relative to the lords.
It also had a lot to do with breaking the power of the church.
Because the church had always indicated that, you know, the wages of sin is death, and the church had always preached, because, you know, it never wants people to have any access to real medicine, the church always preached that illness was the result of sin.
And, as you can well imagine, the mortality rate of priests during the Black Death was just enormous, because they went to everybody's deathbed and so caught the plague, and, you know, I mean, the priests The priest class was just completely decimated, which of course lowered the power of the church, and of course in people's minds, since they'd been taught that illness results from sin, and the fact that the priest died the most did not give people a very positive view of the morality of the church.
So things sort of began to come together within people's minds.
So in the sort of successive waves of intergenerational nightmare that was the sort of 300-year reign of the Black Death, You had a rise in labor.
You had a decimation of children, in particular, of course, which meant that land could centralize a little bit more towards one person.
So you had a consolidation of land, so you didn't have these ridiculous little sort of strips and hooks and patchworks of land, which were very inefficient to farm.
And, you know, as I mentioned before, in the 11th century, the shoulder harness was invented, which allowed Oxen and cows and donkeys and mules to pull much more than before.
Before, they just put a noose around the neck, so if you pulled too much, the horse would choke.
But after the invention of the shoulder harness, you could plow your earth that much more effectively.
You know, crop rotation came in, the introduction of winter crops came in, and so you began to get a real rise in food.
Now, in what is pretentiously in history circles called the Quatrocento.
You began to also have the rise of the dissemination of the Roman texts regarding law and the organization of city life, which had been sort of laying moldering in monasteries and in the Arabic lands for most of the Dark Ages and Early Middle Ages.
So you had a rise of a much more secular approach to life, right?
I mean, all of the Roman writers.
Well, most of the Roman writers, of course, were what Christianity would consider pagans and what most of us would consider sort of agnostics.
They sort of paid lip service to the gods, but they weren't as fanatical as the Christians were.
And so you began to have the rise of sort of a review of secular law, a rise of respect for Aristotelianism.
And the rejection of Platonists and the Neo-Platonists.
I mean, there's a whole lot of factors that came together.
And of course, the break in the church was essential.
When Christendom was united under the Catholic Church, usury was impossible except for the Jewish classes.
I think it was just the Jewish classes.
So, of course, the Jews threw themselves into education because they weren't allowed to own land.
And they often weren't allowed to own property at all, so they had to have sort of portable Intellectual capital is their only riches, so they threw themselves into education.
They became bankers, of course, because they were allowed to lend for profit, which of course the church in its hypocritical, naturally and inevitably hypocritical state, you know, but the church borrowed a lot of money to fund wars and then the aristocracy borrowed a lot of money from the Jews to fund wars, which is sort of where the rise of anti-semitism comes from in the West, right?
Anti-semitism was fanned up by the church and by the nobles because, you know, when they got too much in debt to the Jewish lenders, they'd just fan up a whole bunch of pogroms and then they would go and strip the lenders or threaten them and so on.
So, I mean, that was a pretty common phenomenon, right?
If you want to look at racism down at its root, you know, generally, or bigotry, it almost always has ill-informed economic roots to it, right?
So, I mean, racism, as we've talked about before, the rise of union power and the imposition of the minimum wage was a direct response to black men undercutting white men for mostly construction jobs, but, you know, other types of labor.
So, what happens is you, through the shattering of Christendom and the The legalization of birth control.
They used to use sheep's bladders, if I remember rightly, as condoms.
But you began to have centralization of wealth.
You began to have the capacity to lend for interest, which is to say you can't have capitalism without the ability to lend for interest, because nobody invests, therefore nobody Um, improves, therefore, uh, the profit never goes up, therefore productivity never goes up, so you're stuck in this sort of middle-aged slaughterhouse of endless starvation and war.
And so, you know, all of these things came together and, you know, the rise of food production and the increase of investment in capital machinery and factories and so on provided opportunities to people who were out in the country.
Now, to get a sense of the 17th century in particular was called a sad century.
And the reason for that was, of course, religious wars were just tearing Europe limb from limb.
I mean, there's stories of people going through Germany during Germany's hundred years of religious wars and saying, you know, I scarce saw a tree which did not have a person hanging from it.
You know, one of the fine... Anabaptists, I think, believed in adult baptism and so the way that they were dealt with was that they were drowned alive as adults, which, you know, was the fine... I think it was... I can't remember if it was the Calvary or the Lutherans or the The Quakers or whoever it was.
But, you know, basically during this war they would just grab people, torture them, and kill them.
The Spanish Inquisition, you know, the Hundred Years War.
I mean, the religion was just tearing Europe limb from limb.
And basically people sort of said at one point, like, enough!
Like, we just have to separate the church and the state because we're going to destroy ourselves completely this way.
I mean, there's just this constant slaughterhouse, which is exactly what you'd expect when you combine irrational fanaticism or irrational absolutism with the power of the state, which itself is irrationally absolute I mean, these chemicals together produce genocide, right?
I mean, we sort of know that from looking at the current world and also throughout history.
So...
And of course the nobles.
And so the other thing that happened was that once you start to get wealth accumulated in capital, you really begin to break the back of aristocratic power.
Because land is sort of one thing.
When wealth is based on land, what you want to do is you want to grab a whole bunch of land, enslave a whole bunch of serfs, and use the profits of their enslavement to pay for the people.
Who enslaved them, right?
So as the noble, you say, oh, this patch of land is mine.
It's like, just like, I don't know, a hundred square miles is mine.
And you do that when you come back from a war, which has already been funded, so you already have an army.
And so you come back from the Crusades, and so you grab some land, or you're given it by the king.
And, you know, just like now, you tax people to pay for the military, which allows you to tax them.
I mean, it's a beautiful parasitic relationship that It's very functional, as we know, because it's lasted for thousands and thousands of years of human history.
But, of course, unbelievably destructive.
And, frankly, against the self-interest of those in power, too.
So, as we've talked about before.
So, land you can grab, and you can guard, and you can defend, and you can fight wars over, and you can chain people, too.
And, of course, land is not portable, right?
You have to take land to use a car top land and ship it over to France if the king in England gets too repressive.
But capital is wonderful in that sense.
It's completely portable.
I mean, largely portable, right?
Especially when it's in gold rather than in electronic bank statements.
So, you know, if the king in England isn't too friendly towards trade, well, guess what?
You just up and go to Holland, which was the other center, a great center of capitalism in the 18th century.
And if Holland then starts to crack down and the taxes get too high, you just take your bucket of gold and you disguise it as a bunch of fish and you ship it off to France.
And so the fact of the matter is that the change of the wealth of society from land to capital produced a situation wherein the power of the state was limited by the portability of that which it was that they were trying to control.
And so, of course, this is why in the modern world you generally find that states will always restrict the movement of capital out of the country, right?
I mean, this is so common that it's ridiculous, right?
And the reason they do that, of course, is because they're sort of worried about the fact that if they tax too much, capital is going to leave the country.
So that is something that is also very important to understand.
But the upshot of all of this is that basically you get The rise of the free market, the rise of the ability to borrow at interest, and the centralization of capital which results in the creation of factories and you had enough excess food production that people could leave the country.
Of course, they didn't have that much to do in the country because there was an excess of food production relative to the labor required.
So, people began to, where possible, they began to leave for the city.
And, of course, they left for the city for a large number of reasons.
I mean, to escape rural ignorance, to get out from under, perhaps, abusive parents, to escape the church, and because, you know, they didn't really want to go into the military or into the priestly classes.
And so, they went voluntarily.
Like, voluntarily.
It was one of the large mass migrations in human history.
And it's voluntary.
You know, it's important to understand, you know, when people come to America in the 19th century, like millions and millions of immigrants flee the sort of brutal state and church powers of the old countries in Europe and around the world.
And they come to America.
They're not forced to come to America.
They come to America purely voluntary, and that's very important.
I mean, purely voluntary to some degree is in quotes, right?
Because, you know, they were forced to leave by the corruptions in their existing countries, but the choice still to find a freer country was important.
And it's important to understand that that is a choice that is exercised.
Nobody forced people to come and work in the mines and to come and work in the factories and what we would call the sweatshops.
They came voluntarily.
That's sort of important, right?
So, I mean, people are just as smart back then and just as interested in their own self-interest back then as they are now.
So if lots of people who aren't coerced to do something, do something, you've got to understand that it's to their benefit, right?
And if it looks horrible what they came to, right, but they came to it, like the factories and the mines, but they came to it voluntarily, I think that gives you a sense of what it is they were leaving behind.
I mean, if a woman takes her children and shows up in a battered woman's shelter, and maybe her husband was rich and so on, and she lives a life of penury and poverty to get away from her husband, but it was her choice to leave her husband, I think what that's important to help us understand is the nature of her marriage was a nightmare.
And that's certainly true statistically and historically, if you just look at the facts.
I mean, the way that people lived on the farms was a complete nightmare.
Starvation rates ran, you know, 5, 10, 15 percent a year.
You know, the infant mortality rate was staggering.
No access to education, no access to healthcare was almost non-existent in the country in particular.
People just died like flies.
You know, they were subject to constant wars, right?
I mean, one of the great things that you get when you flee to a city is that you find it less likely, in a free market situation, it's less likely that someone's going to come and invade that city, right?
If you have a Hamlet on a farm in the middle of nowhere, you can sort of be run over, as you saw, you know, I think it was a pretty bad film, but there was a good scene in it, or a terrifying scene in it.
In the movie Cold Mountain, wherein you see what happens to women in particular, whose husbands have died, who live in the country, this idea of the law's protection was pretty illusory, of course, because the state didn't do any better at protecting the needy back then than it does now.
And you see that these women are just used as sexual slaves, and their children are killed, and they are raped and killed.
And this is the sort of state of nature that occurs in the country when you don't have the protection of city militia and so on.
And so to flee to the city is a pretty good deal.
And to work 12 hours a day for a certain wage, which gives you a pretty comfortable life, Insofar as, yeah, you might get paid, you know, five pennies a day, but you can rent a room for a week for two pennies with room on board, right?
So, I mean, and yeah, okay, you have to work 12 hours a day in a dangerous environment.
But, you know, that's a lot better than working sixteen hours a day in a murderous environment.
So, you know, you know that these people were choosing something better than where they came from because so many of them came.
And so many of them gave up the sort of wonderful medieval life of the farm to come to the cities and to work in the factories.
And so it's really hard to sort of understand how people say that it was a terrible exploitive situation when so many people voluntarily came along.
And it wasn't because their farms were shut down or You know, agribusiness threw them off their land because they desperately wanted to escape the country because it was such a nightmare to live there.
And finally, in the sort of last but not least category, it's important to look at the actual effects of the Industrial Revolution.
You know, when things look worse, it doesn't mean like when they sort of look worse from the forward looking back, it's important to understand what the blame is.
What is the blame for things happening worse?
I'll give you an example that I'm not too satisfied with metaphorically, but I think does get something across.
I can't come up with a better one just now.
If you're a lifelong smoker and you get lung cancer, then you don't feel bad while you're smoking too much because you're enjoying yourself and so on.
And then you get lung cancer and you go to your doctor and you start to feel, you know, because you're feeling bad, you're coughing and so on, shortness of breath.
And then you go in for chemotherapy and you feel terrible, right?
But you're actually sort of, that's your only chance for survival.
You're getting better through the process of chemotherapy, although you feel a lot worse.
And of course, you know, you see this in therapy all the time that people sort of feel depressed and sad and empty but not horrible and then they start to come into therapy and they start to have to deal with the things that they've experienced in the past and they start to feel worse, right?
That's sort of an indication that you're getting better, right?
I mean, if you sustain some terrible injury in your body, you want to feel pain, right?
If you feel nothing, it's usually worse than feeling something.
And so, you know, the fact that things are looking worse can often be the indication that things are getting better, right?
I mean, certainly when you go to the gym and you don't feel like exercising, it doesn't feel that great, but it's good for you.
So just looking at the aesthetics of a situation and, you know, these sad-faced children and these minors down the mines and so on, I understand that it sort of looks worse.
But you really can't blame the free market for that.
I mean, when you look at the history of human society, you know, it's tens of thousands of years of murder and slaughter and exploitation, you know, with the power of religion and the power of the state lording it over and crushing humanity's soul for, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of years from the sort of tribal structure all the way through the aristocracy of the 17th century.
You know, is it really fair?
And of course this completely impoverishes and destroys what we would today call an economy.
It really didn't exist in the way that we would understand it now.
And we simply weren't allowed to do anything.
You couldn't start a business.
You couldn't borrow any money.
You couldn't own anything in any sort of real way.
You had no access to any sort of objective court system and so on.
Kind of similar to now.
But the issue is that that absolutely destroyed human capacity, human innovation, human creativity, human possibilities.
And so, what does that mean?
Can you really blame the free market for inheriting this kind of abysmal, destroyed human capacity?
I mean, if you look at what the free market was able to do in terms of turning around Human history, right?
I mean, never before.
And of course, this could have happened at any time in human history.
It was never fixed in the late 18th century, or mid to late 18th century.
That was never the pre-appointed time for humanity to turn around.
It could have happened in the Roman era.
It could have happened 10,000 years ago.
And we would have been spared 10,000 years of human misery and self-destruction.
And the lives of people come and gone, who will never come back again, completely wasted, generation after generation of people, enslaved with their faces pushed into a poisonous and virulent kind of mud, and slaughtered in war, and killed by the church, and tortured to death by the aristocracy, and all of the human potential, all of the genius of humanity, just ground into powder by these sociopathic rulers and church leaders for thousands and thousands.
Think of all of the riches, all of the great novels, that were never written, all of the great songs that were never written, all of the great inventions that never occurred, all of the cures for cancer that could have come around 10,000 years ago if people had been free.
And this continued for tens of thousands of years, since the dawn of the planet until the 18th century.
So the fact that the free market inherits this complete ruin of a species, this complete horror of a social system and that it's starting from nothing.
I mean, if you want to build a factory now, you go order the parts to build that factory from other factories.
But there was nothing like that in the 18th and 19th century.
Well, towards the end of the 19th, yes.
But, you know, if you wanted to build a factory, you had to figure out how to build the machinery.
You had to build a factory, to build a factory, to build the factory, to build the factory.
So, you know, you really had to bootstrap yourself up from nothing.
So is it really fair to blame freedom for the effects of tens of thousands of years of state predation and destruction?
I don't think it really is fair to say that the first time that humanity had any choice and possibility that the system which gave them that And of course resulted in the kinds of freedoms and riches that we have now.
Freedom can be blamed for the effects, for inheriting the effects of thousands and thousands of years of brute slavery and violence and rape and viciousness and destruction and child abuse.
It's inheriting a complete mess.
To put it mildly, and you don't blame somebody, or you don't blame a system for inheriting the mass of a system that it's complete opposite.
So that's sort of important to understand.
As far as child labor goes, well, I mean, all you really have to do is ask the question, would children rather be working or dead?
I mean, it really is that simple.
I mean, that's all it comes down to.
I mean, you know, you say to children, would you rather be working or would you rather be dead?
Because, I mean, that's the only choice that they had.
Infant mortality through the first half of the 19th century declined precipitously.
So the children were working, but they weren't dead!
So I can't really understand why people say that these children shouldn't have been down the mines and they shouldn't have been working, which is the same thing that's true in the sweatshop argument now.
Well, okay, the alternative is that they die.
I'm not making that up.
That's just the statistics of the facts of the matter.
Same thing with women, right?
The women who would normally die in childbirth, many times now in the Industrial Revolution, with the additional health that came from additional protein and additional calories.
If you look at the calorie count and the protein count of people in the 19th century, it goes up and up and up, right?
Wages double every 25 to 50 years.
Completely unprecedented in history.
So, it's kind of hard to understand why people feel that children working is bad.
I mean, I guess they have this bizarre fantasy that maybe if they weren't in the factories that they would have been in school or dancing around the maypole in some Dungeons and Dragons medieval fantasy of what the rural life was like back then.
But, you know, the choice in reality for these children and their parents was, you know, work or die.
And, you know, of course, this is a time before capitalism had invented birth control.
And, you know, so of course, and if the church had still had a very strong influence, anti-sensual influence, and so, you know, people had too many children still, even the Protestants.
And so that, of course, had to be wrestled under control.
And the best contraception in the long run is, of course, industrialization, right?
I mean, as soon as you have a sort of fairly certain guarantee that your children are going to make it through life and be available to you when you're old age without dying, and so they can support you, then you really don't have to worry about having so many, right?
I mean, the reason that industrializations have fewer children is that they're going to live.
And also because you can save for your own retirement so you don't have to have like 20 kids of which, you know, four will survive to your retirement and you'll need all four of them so that you won't starve to death after you can't work anymore.
So there's lots of sort of important characteristics to the Industrial Revolution, but of course You want to compare it to what came before.
One of the interesting things about the Industrial Revolution is it was, of course, much studied and much reviewed.
Some of it was pure falsehood, right?
Like Engle's Conditions of the Working Class in England was a completely falsified document.
You can look that up on the web if you like.
But, I mean, they just sort of made up these terrible conditions.
And the reason they made up these terrible conditions was so that, you know, they could expand state power and the church could expand its power and so on.
So, you know, they invented the poor as much as the poor are sort of invented and maintained now for the expansion of state power so that you can wage war against taxpayers.
And, of course, you have nothing to do with helping the poor.
But before, there's just not as much documentation, right?
The Industrial Revolution produced its own self-documentation due to the rise of the educated classes and those concerned with, you know, issues that never existed before.
I mean, the issue of how can we improve the lot of children didn't exist before when infant mortality was ridiculously high and children died like flies.
So, you know, the fact that people are grappling with issues like child labor is a heck of a lot better than dealing with the issues of where do we bury, you know, the twelfth child that we've had that's died.
So, you know, it's just sort of important to understand that there's a natural slant when there's more self-documentation and examination of problems, that something looks worse.
But, of course, in the sort of 17th century, sorry, the 16th century, there's not as much documentation because, you know, everyone just kind of died out in the countryside and nobody knew anything about it, right?
So when a village gets wiped out by starvation because they just had a bad harvest, It's not recorded in the history books.
Nobody went out there, they just end up, you know, nobody hears about it.
But when everybody's in the city, and the educated people are coming in contact with poverty, in a sense, in a deep sense, for the first time, then they're going to write about it and be shocked and appalled about it.
But that's progress!
I mean, that's good!
You know, the people dying anonymously in the country that are never recorded, you know, is not an indication of, no, there are no problems.
In fact, it's quite the indication of the opposite.
When people really begin complaining, it's because they're getting better.
And when things begin to sort of obviously, and in a recorded sense, look worse, it's because people are surviving rather than dying.
And they may be surviving sort of precariously, but that's a whole lot better than dying for sure, is to survive precariously.
And that's the main reason why people went to the cities, was because they wanted to live rather than die.
And they also wanted for their children to have a chance To live rather than to die, both in terms of life and in terms of economic opportunity and what was going on.
So, when you look at the Industrial Revolution, there's just a lot more than you need to look at than this sort of Dickensian world of children working.
And, you know, to recognize the fact that social agencies based on coercion and irrational absolutes like the church and the state, you know, really had problems.
With the rise of the free market, but were sort of helpless to prevent it for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were economically exhausted from endless wars.
So, it's just important to have a look at this from a number of different angles.
And, you know, the thing I would suggest, if you want to have a look at the Industrial Revolution, just look at the statistics.
I mean, look at infant mortality, look at the rise of calorie Look at the rise of wages, look at the survival rate of people into old age and, you know, just sort of compare it to what was going on before.
So when people start talking to you about the Industrial Revolution, you can just sort of ask them and say, well, one thing I'm curious about is, you know, why would so many millions of people choose to work in the factories?
I mean, they weren't forced there, right?
They voluntarily up and left the family farm in order to come to the cities.
You know, why do you think they did that?
And just help them explore the idea.
Logically, it would make sense that where they were coming from is worse than where they were going to, and where they were coming from was not a result of the free market, but a result of the aristocratic domination of land ownership.
So, in order to escape that kind of yoke, they sort of had to march to freedom to get to the cities where they had to work hard, of course, but that wasn't the fault of the free market, but rather the fault of state predation and church predation for the past tens of thousands of years, which resulted in, you know, a complete lack of accumulation of human, physical, and intellectual capital.
That's sort of an important thing to explore with people.
Now, this afternoon I got another interesting email from a young gentleman who's founded a libertarian group, and he sort of had some question of what would be the best thing to do, and I have some, I guess, fairly certain ideas about that, which I will try to get to this afternoon.
So I hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you soon.
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