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David Galinsky's avatar

This is a great contribution to explaining how freedom and Free-enterprise are the path to a better and lasting future.

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Christian Claypoole's avatar

About a year ago, I got hooked on a series of historical novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic period. I have now read similar series by other authors, all British, that have several things in common. While the adventures of the heroes were quite fanciful, as these are entertainment adventures, the background commentary of the main characters is interesting in light of this essay.

As bad as conditions were for the sailors on ships of the British Navy of the time, there were often remarks that it was better than farm life in that they ate meat (for certain values of "meat") every day as well as a grog ration. Meat was quite rare for most farm folk, which is why poaching was common. Many of the stories had a character leave the farm as a puny youngster but end up several years later as a normal (for the time) young man.

The social upheavals of the time saw landlords (read: the lords who owned the land, think about the implications) " enclosing" their lands. That meant that many of their tenants, who had feudal rights to graze livestock on the commons, were now without the means for a living. Many were encouraged to go north, to the mines and factories. Some were offered passage to America, gratis, as that was cheaper than paying the Poor Tax and supporting such indigents. There are other examples of the protagonists showing modern attitudes in their treatment of their tenants and other poor, since the hero can't be seen by modern readers to be "mean." Although I would guess that a higher percentage of current day Brits know about conditions then than Americans do. We've always been rich and enlightened, right?

A long build up for my point, which is that the greatest hole in the historical knowledge of the average American (probably similar for others, but I haven't the experience of interaction with them) is that poverty is the base condition of humanity. It's the starting point. And until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, which enabled each other, nearly everyone was bloody poor! And free markets with free trade are still lifting people around the world out of abject poverty. And yet there is opposition to this process, primarily from those either ideologically against freedom or those deliberately miseducated or left cripplingly ignorant by state schools.

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