History

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

EmperorNero — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:00:51 GMT

Cari:
4. Workers believed that the American Dream of equality was being denied to them and they made great efforts that included violence to send the message that employers needed to shape up working conditions.

5. Workers looked to government to change their conditions because they were unable to effect change on their own.

The popular belief that government intervention improved working conditions is nonsense and contradicts basic supply and demand economics. Better conditions do not appear out of thin air because we declare them into existence. They are made possible because society becomes richer and is able to afford them. In the past conditions were crappy because society was poor. It was because free markets made us more productive that we could start improving conditions. That was when people started being unhappy with the old conditions. Before that, nobody protested them because they were considered normal. Capitalism didn't create bad conditions, it turned them into a problem by improving conditions.

Capitalists compete for workers, thus workers receive higher compensation as society becomes more productive because higher productivity means labor becomes more scarce in terms of real wealth. As better working conditions become affordable, employers will provide them to compete for scarce labor. If it is cheaper to buy safety equipment than paying workers to work in an unsafe environment, employers will provide it. So better working conditions are nothing more than a result of raised productivity. Supply and demand causes wages and conditions to improve, not laws. This is so blatantly obvious that it's odd that anyone ever thinks otherwise. Indeed, if working conditions were raised by laws, why would anyone ever provide better conditions than the legally mandated minimum?

Btw. in reality such laws were not intended to help workers, but to keep small companies, for whom it was more expensive to implement such requirements due to scale, from being able to compete with big companies. This had the intended effect of cartelizing the market in the hands of few big companies, which meant that they could pay workers less. Same as environmental regulation today.

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

John James — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:03:48 GMT

NonAntiAnarchist:
We need a thread on how to turn our girlfriends into anarchists. So far I've failed miserably.

Walter "Advice to the Lovelorn" Block spoke a bit on this a while back.

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

John James — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:59:53 GMT

Cari,

Welcome to the forum! Be sure to check out the newbie thread, filled with bunches of useful tips...

New member? READ THIS!

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

John James — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:58:07 GMT

Please don't forget this!

The Transformation of the American Economy

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Wheylous — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:31:41 GMT

Last year, yes. I mean, it's not the horror many people make it out to be - but that's only because for most people the information goes in one year and out the other.

I've always took the history taught to us with a grain of salt, and my recent explorations into libertarianism have led me to question a lot of history:

- It doesn't make sense for SO to have gotten so big and so evil

- Why would people continually buy rotten meat?

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Cari — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:07:48 GMT

Thank you Wheylous!

I appreciate the heads-up about the Meat Packing plants. You must have gone through a similiar school experience as I am going through now?

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Wheylous — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:48:51 GMT

I posted this before, but it might have gotten lost in the sea of text. Here is the link about Standard Oil:

http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

Essentially, as far as I can tell, SO was a free-market company that became large because it was good and beneficial to consumers. At the end of the article I do mention the tariffs and patents that helped it, yet those are of course again an argument against government.

If next week the meatpacking business is brought up, remember this: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Meat_packing

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Cari — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:33:07 GMT

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Cari — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:30:49 GMT

Ugg!

I just spend 15 minutes typing out a post only to find it posted as a blank! LOL, what a start.

I want to thank everyone for thier helpful replies.

I have started some of the readings from FEE (a very good site, been reading it for a few years now). It did not occur to me that many historians were Marxists and their interpretations of history would reflect that. It makes sense. Marxists would find reason to downgrade capitalism in favor of workers even if the workers were better off.

I also liked the idea that Mises and Heyek put forth of that the complaints of workers was a sign that the IR was working and starting to raise living standards instead of the other way around as was pointed out. Isn't it funny that sometimes it is just a matter of looking at an idea or event from a different point of view? It might be that we all have been subjected to a Marxian historical view for a long time. The idea that living standards improved only makes sense...because that is what happened of course.

Now the problem arises as many will say that was because of the people getting the government to step in and control the amount of harm and exploitation that greedy factory owners were causing. What is the best way to explain how a freed-market could have brought about those reforms withouth government's help? So far, I have always argued that once living standards rise, people make substitutes for wages in the form of better working conditions and this would naturally progress in a free-market system without government interference.

I think my previous readings of Steve Horwitz have helped about this subject on other levels as well. He has brought out that the nature of the family has changed in steps along with rises in living conditions. When the IR came into being, both men and women along with their children went there and worked long and hard hours. This is in comparison with working long and hard hours at home in the fields. The move towards the factories resluted in comparable dangerous work, but with better pay. Once livng standards increased, children were sent back home followed by women leaving men as the main breadwinners of the family. Education of children, which once was a luxury due to cost, was now standardized. Improvements in technology led to more leisure time for all and better wages yet.

I had a preview of next week's subjects and it will pertain to specific working conditions in the factories and the subsequent reforms passed by government. I will focus on subject matter pertaining to that so that I may be able to "plant some seeds."

Also, I am looking foward to reading more about Rockefeller and the many (mis)conceptions about Standard Oil. From my basic understanding of Economics, it was almost impossible for J-Rock to have a monopoly unless government somehow was involved. Thus, J-Rock had more of an "efficiency" free-market monopoly than the typical monopoly that most people associate with S.O. in that while had had a dominant market share he gave consumers the best price and best product possible at that point. Something was mentioned that later, J-Rock got into bed with Uncle Sam? Is that true? What of the legislation passed that affected S.O?

I look foward to replies! I will devote more time this weekend to this as well. For now, I have a couple of quizzes to study for.

Cari

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Wheylous — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:14:30 GMT

Try using Firefox or Chrome if you have disappearing posts.

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Cari — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:06:02 GMT

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Jargon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:04:49 GMT

Welcome to the forum

Good on you for digging into the Gilded Age. It is a fascinating time and often combined with manipulations against free-markets. Wheylous has covered it but I had to say:

Standard Oil was good! Wait what? The evil oil monopoly who drove everyone out of business? Who rebated 'unfairly' with the railroads? The one who controlled 90% of market output by 1890? Yes, the very one. Constrained by the laws of supply and demand, this explosive growth in a time of relatively free-markets could only come from one place: extraordinary entrepeneurship. By the end of its career in 1911, Standard chased the price of refined oil down to a tiny fraction of what it was at the beginning. Making oil so cheap opened up inestimable productivity to society. It allowed trains, cars, and machines to run cheaper, opening up the market.

Oil companies got a lot meaner when they found out that they could get rich by buying politics rather than selling products. This started to happen around the turn of the century when Morgan and Rockefeller realized how much cheaper congress was than the market.

Also, was there any place in recorded history where Industrialization was not a painful period? The gilded age was not a free market at all, but it was relatively free, which was conducive to a rapid accumulation of capital and end to the process of industrialization. Real wages doubled from 1880-1890.

It was certainly not a free market. Subsidized railroads used the ICC and eminent domain to cartelize, big oil used tariffs, lots of companies used government force to shut down strikes (there's nothing 'anti-free-market' about workers strikes). But it was also not as bad as class agitators would like people to think. Of course there will be overcrowding, sickness and poverty during the industrialization process. It worse in Britain with chartered corporations. Russia and China lost millions of lives trying to do it the government way. One should ask when thinking about the standard of living in America's Gilded Age "compared to what?"

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Neodoxy — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:57:33 GMT

"NO. IT MUST BE DONE NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Wheylous, you crazy kid! ;P

Anyway, Wheylous' superb post pretty much sums it up. Any further problems and I'll lend a hand.

Edit.

Also, something that is always important to remember is that history is useless without science. If I were writing a military history and I had no conception of military science then I'd probably get a lot of things wrong in my history. The same is true of economics. It is only through theories that we can properly conceive of history. This and the rest of what I write here, is the essence of Mises' Thesis in his book fittingly called "Theory and History". If you were an animist then you would believe that the reason that rains returned to area Y after a massive rain dance was because of the gods smiling upon the people in the area, whereas if you were a modern individual then you would consider it happenstance. By the same measure, preconceived economic ideas of historians shape the way that they view events in the past. Were living standards low because of monopolies depressing wages? Or was it because there was little capital was accumulated per capita? This depends upon preconception and its application to history, not something that is uncovered a posteriori by the historian.

This makes historians into the "masters of the social sciences", as it were, because they are the ones who write in the most prolific and classically smiled upon social science, history, and meanwhile they are also the ones who get to draw the relationship of cause and effect in history, explaining how X came to be, which then effects how people look at event Y which lead to X, specifically because economists look at theory, and ponder over models, much more than they do write history books, so their word is much more academic, and seemingly theoretical, rather than the historian whose work is supposed to be facts about the past.

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

Wheylous — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:56:09 GMT

Also interesting is this article on progressivism:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/eugenics-progressivism%E2%80%99s-ultimate-social-engineering/

The ideas presented are a bit shocking, so I just now sent an email to the author to ask for references to back-up the claims.

Re: Industrial Rev / Guilded Age Philosphy in History Books

tunk — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:25:24 GMT

Wheylous' post was quite comprehensive so I'll condense my comments.

#2. Besides asking the obvious question, "Squalor compared to what?" we can note the fact that historians generally agree that real wages rose during most of the 19th century, particularly after the 1830s. They might well have risen faster had England not been at war with revolutionary France. (See the article at EconLib.)

Some might be inclined to attribute this to union activity; this great article makes mincemeat of that claim, noting that the industrializing countries had puny unionization rates overall. Also see F. A. Harper's great little book Why Wages Rise. The Libertarian Alliance has an Industrial Revolution reading list.

More resources of interest: this article from Cato detailing how government interventions into the housing market propped up the tenement system in New York after market forces had started to erode it, and Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners by Price Fishback, which shows that many workers were free to move between so-called "company towns" and workers in dangerous jobs were paid compensating wage differentials.

#3-6 pretty much rehashes the standard Arthur Schlesinger goo-goo version of history, where the Progressive Era is painted as a popular uprising against the excesses of big business and "robber baron" capitalism. Democrat court history par excellence.

Fortunately, lots of great revisionism has been penned since by New Left scholars, showing instead that the Progressive period was the result of an attempt by industry in cahoots with unionism and the state to cartelize the American economy and suppress the vigorous competition of the 19th century. The essential reading list: The Triumph of Conservatism; The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State; A New History of Leviathan; and Watershed of Empire.