All right, all right, Uncle Pennybags. Look, it's easy for you to defend capitalism now. But you
also have to take into account the Industrial Revolution, how it started, and not sweep the
costs under the rug, when you're mentioning the benefits. It wasn't a humanitarian revolution.
It was good for the machines, but it wasn't as good for those human beings who are powering those
machines. Modern people look at depictions of the poor from the past, and they think something must
have made them poor; must be the system they were living under. But they don't think beyond
that. They think history began 10 seconds ago. Suddenly, there was an Industrial Revolution.
We don't even ask about what came before. And then we look at it compared to our existence today,
and we say we're much richer today. So that must be because the government rescued us from this,
not capitalism and machinery. And you can say, we've had a welfare state since then,
we've had the government transferring wealth from the rich to the poor, maybe that accounts
for it? But the real explosion in wealth occurred before there was a welfare state.
You can measure how much more productive people are today, by how long it takes them to work to
earn the money they need to buy necessities. You want to buy a loaf of bread in 1950? You have to
work six minutes. You want to buy it in 2000, you have to work three and a half minutes. That's
a huge improvement. Denim! In 1900, you have to work nine hours to get a pair of jeans. In 2000,
you only have to work three, that's two thirds less time, unless you're getting some fancy denim,
but that's a whole separate story. These are tangible things and ways that people can see that
things have gotten better and cheaper. This wasn't some government law that says jeans have to be two
thirds off. That happened because of the market and because of investment. Here's how Friedrich
Hayek, the Nobel winning economist explained it, he said, until you got the Industrial Revolution,
everybody took for granted that of course, you're going to live a squalid existence,
of course, you're going to be one bad harvest away from starvation. That's the nature of the world.
There's no point protesting that or holding a hunger strike over it, it can't be changed.
But when you have a system that gradually does away with the worst of the poverty,
the most degrading poverty, then you suddenly become impatient with those remaining pockets
of poverty. And you want to protest those, and you become impatient with the only system that's ever
actually eradicated it. Because you didn't notice it before. Capitalism makes you notice something
you used to think was just an unalterable part of the world. Nobody in the year 1200 was protesting
against poverty, even though they were a million times poorer than we are now. Now, of course, I'm
not saying it's great. Nobody in his right mind would want to live in these conditions compared
to today, but the question is, what were these conditions like compared to what they had before?
And the answer to that question comes in the form of why did they move to the factories
if they didn't think the factories represented an improvement
in their condition? But this is still capitalist propaganda you're spewing
in some quest to centralize money, own all four railroads, and the electric company,
and the waterworks, you should go to jail directly to jail and not collect $200 or whatever the 21st
century equivalent would be. Actually the ones spreading this propaganda are actually a lot of
these textbooks, and we know where they're getting it from. It starts with Friedrick Engels, who was
of course, Marx's great collaborator. He wrote a book called The Condition of the Working Class
in England. And that book has not held up, to put it mildly, very well in terms of what historians
think about it. In just chapter seven alone on the proletariat, you can find falsehoods that
include errors of facts and transcription, on pages 152 155 157 159 160 163 165 166
168 170 171 172 178 179 182 185 186 188 189 191 194 and 203. What about 202? 202 was solid.