Accounting for "Exploitation" in Laissez Faire America

Miscellaneous History
1

I just finished reading Preacher.

One thing that really struck me was Cassidy’s flashbacks to Ireland in the early 1900s and his immigration to America. Ireland was a warzone at that time, getting shot up and bombed by the british. It is no wonder so many of them chose to immigrate to the United States. It seems obvious that other ethnic groups like italians and chinese would immigrate for similar reasons.

When Cassidy steps off the boat, he says its “like getting a second chance at life”.

This is very much a contrast to what we got told in high school about this era. We are taught to feel sorry for them in their poverty and that it is capitalism’s fault they are not treated better.

But I ask: In history, what government has ever fed, clothed, and housed millions of refugees? Particularly ones of inferior race? In the modern era of government, our borders are closed to some 2 billion living in warfare and poverty who would come here seeking a better life.

The problem was never that capitalism is evil. The oversupply of workers and paucity of employers was not caused by free enterprise, but rather the lack of it. If more countries had been capitalist there could have been more employers and no need for emigration.

And yet in spite of the near monopsony of employers in America, it still created the highest quality of life for the common man on earth.

I feel this is a very important argument to make. So much of the free market’s critics focus on this era when it should be our greatest triumph: The time when people had a choice between government and freedom, and when millions gambled their lives in our favor.

Cheers Mises people.

Arguments with Socialists
Food prices now versus under laissez-faire
Laissez faire in Manchester in the 1800s and NY in the 1920s?
Capitalism is fundamentally Flawed(Logically?) Discussion with Rob Huesdens
2

Exactly

3

QFT, and really, the same is true for many other areas: environmental issues, Great Depression, etc. - basically I think we need to take our many triumphs more aggressively to the critics on all fronts. We have a tendency to play defence in arguments, when our offense is actually the best there is!

4

Congratulations on your post of win.

5

Just wait until people ignore your argument then use The Jungle by Upton Sinclair as a case for worker exploitation.

6

You didn’t reply before but this confirms my suspicion that your avatar is the sandman, and I think I even remember the panel it’s from. I’m on book 6 (TPB) of both the Preacher and the Sandman.

Oops, off topic

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@All

Thanks for your support!

Oh I’m sorry I didn’t see you ask me about this. Yes it is Morpheus.

8

my great-grandfathering seeing the horrors of WW1 had my grandfather come over here with the growing power of Mussolini and the brown shirts. My grandfather was of a ripe age for the brown shirts and it would seem he got out of there in the knick of time. He served in the U.S. military - draft - and was stationed in Texas at a Italian POW camp. He told us how he would talk to some of them about how wierd it was that he was an Italian but on the other side of the fence.

9

I have to take issue with this. I think you meant to say “one of an unfortunate situation” or something like that. For example, caucasian and negroid are races. Irish and Polish are ethnicities/nationalities. I don’t really buy into the inferior races thing.

Otherwise, great post.

10

QFT as well. I know liberty student has been trying to push this approach for quite some time now, and I agree wholeheartedly. When we debate defensively, we seem cornered. Arguments should be on the terms of liberty, not “the common good” or “think of the children” or whatever other tripe.

11

I actually showed this thread to a couple of my friends, and I’ve been encouraged to write a proper article on it with citations for evidence and etc. I’ve contacted Libertarian Longhorns and they’re interested in publishing it on their blog. Can any of you think of anywhere else I might be able to submit the essay to?

12

mises.org?

13

All the same, the people who want to shut down the maquiladoras in Mexico need to reconsider and realize that those factories offer Mexicans better opportunities than they would otherwise have. If this wasn’t the case they wouldn’t flock to them for work.

14

Lol I didn’t realize that mexico had socialized healthcare.

15

The narrative of “government is good, without government, people would be enslaved and oppressed and broke” is one of the most prevalent myths of our time.

I mean I’ve been looking through the history of financial panics starting from 1837 all the way to 1907 and I think that it’s clear that government intervention has had more to do with credit and money supply expansions as well as overspeculation in certain markets than any other factor. And yet, the narrative goes that “before the Fed, there was chaos and the government was always trying to fix the chaos but was never able to until it consolidated power under the central bank.” I can’t be sure quite yet, but I don’t think history stands on the side of the government argument.

There’s also the mythology surrounding the Great Depression that “the Fed didn’t act quickly enough to stem bank runs after the crash of 1929 and so the money supply got cut by a third and we got deflation and the government had to spend the next 12 years pumping everything back up.” Based on what I’ve learned, it was actually the New Deal that greatly prolonged that recession and made it a depression.

The myth of the robber barons of capitalism is just another story. And it’s told to convince people that whenever there is a serious problem, only government can truly fix it.

16

The book The Other Path talks about how government intervention keeps the Peruvian’s down. Similar to what you’re saying. He also references Mercantilism in Western History as an example of this.

Albert Jay Nock discusses this quite a bit. He talks about how the state was basically running state capitalism for the benefit of the landholder and property owners and it kept down the poor. Fortunately there were enough cracks in the system that in the US and England poor peasants had opportunities. Cracks in the system are also discussed by Rothbard and others as the origin of medieval towns, medieval trade and fairs, industrial factories, etc.

There’s lots to show that even besides the obvious case of slavery, the individual States making up the US were always doing anti-laissez faire things.

17

Link to where I can find this? I’m currently under the (questionable) impression that 1850-1900-ish was pretty minarchist.

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Google mises.org. I saw some stuff lately discussing Nock and Jefferson.

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I think workers were exploited in ‘laissez faire’ America, that is jipped, but more by the effects of the legal and cultural system developed in a statist society than by eevul capitalists.

20

Yeah, we get it, the state is bad.