“The dystopian perspective promoted by the vast majority of labor historians reflects not the facts, but dogmatic anti-market ideology.” The money quote.
I thought the really insidious thing about company towns was that they issued their own currency and made sure that rent and food were always higher than pay so the workers were always in perpetual debt to the company?
Hidden concern for political power is not concern for economic power. And see _Rooseveltcare_ (online) by Don Watkins, a study of widespread, effective, private unemployment insurance and pensions in the US before the hysteria that created Social Security. Big city phonebooks listed hundreds of such organizations. And, the first attacks on capitalism were from religious conservatives hysterical over mans independent mind. Marx drew on them for his early writings, denouncing "cash nexus" replacing sacrifice and praising the holistic joys of medievalism.
There is only one basic economic issue: the focused mind vs. the unfocused mind, as Ayn Rand identified in 1957.
My overall impression reminds me of the old phrase from someone at EconLog: "Markets fail; use markets."
i.e., markets aren't perfect, but they're the best of all feasible alternatives.
“The dystopian perspective promoted by the vast majority of labor historians reflects not the facts, but dogmatic anti-market ideology.” The money quote.
I thought the really insidious thing about company towns was that they issued their own currency and made sure that rent and food were always higher than pay so the workers were always in perpetual debt to the company?
Hidden concern for political power is not concern for economic power. And see _Rooseveltcare_ (online) by Don Watkins, a study of widespread, effective, private unemployment insurance and pensions in the US before the hysteria that created Social Security. Big city phonebooks listed hundreds of such organizations. And, the first attacks on capitalism were from religious conservatives hysterical over mans independent mind. Marx drew on them for his early writings, denouncing "cash nexus" replacing sacrifice and praising the holistic joys of medievalism.
There is only one basic economic issue: the focused mind vs. the unfocused mind, as Ayn Rand identified in 1957.