I recently did this video http://www.vimeo.com/2611866 explaining the investment theory of party competition. I wonder how y’all Austrians think that the capital intensive vs. labor intensive (& laissez faire vs. protectionist) divide will play out in your favored future society. Why wouldn’t a state form --as a tool or commodity-- out of a demand by the different owners of industry?
Overall, it’s a decent video. One minor quibble: some Jeffersonians were against tariffs. Southerners depended on foreign whereas New Englanders wanted protection from British manufacturing, leading to a political war of sorts over protectionism. The graphs aren’t really accurate (notice the HUGE scatter), but it might interest you that during the late 1800s many businesses were seeking government protection: another failure of unlimited government and corporatism. It’s well known, for example, that many railroads were very heavily subsidized.
A major problem with the book is its over-reliance on empiricism. There were many potential cases of post hoc analysis in the graphs and passages that you read/pointed out.
Also, the argument that businesses pushed through minimum wages to crowd out unions is baffling. Labor intensive businesses couldn’t afford higher wages for all of their workers, they were against such measures. Unions, on the other hand, supported minimum wages because it got rid of the low-skilled workers (called “scabs” and terrorized by Big Labor) who would undermine their efforts to artificially raise wages.
Furthermore, the graph representing class conflict is quite odd. There is no conflict between labor and capital - labor benefits from capital. There is a conflict between labor UNIONS, which represent the values of skilled workers, and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can only pay as high a wage as the worker’s marginal productivity. By being able to drive out lower skilled workers, unions were able to artificially raise wages for their members.