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Thread: Where does the fault lay for the working and living conditions during the gilded age?

  1. #1

    Where does the fault lay for the working and living conditions during the gilded age?

    I'm a hardcore Ron Paul and Mises/CATO supporter. I'm taking this class in college called the History of the Gilded Age. We are learning about the living and working conditions for many immigrants and freed blacks during the 70/80s. Was the government at fault? Was capitalism at fault? How was class mobility? I don't just want to get my classroom's bias on the issue.



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  3. #2
    The civil-war had much more of a negative impact on American society than ever seems to really be acknowledged.
    Last edited by Petar; 10-17-2010 at 05:26 PM.
    Donald Trump > SJW ass-tears

  4. #3
    No one forced anyone to work in any bad conditions. People chose to work in those conditions because they were better than the alternative.

    A sweat shop beats starving.

  5. #4
    Yeah and it was also a myth that there was massive complaints from workers about conditions. Union membership was estimated to only be 10 percent among workers by 1900.
    I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'

    Abigail Adams

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Legend1104 View Post
    Yeah and it was also a myth that there was massive complaints from workers about conditions. Union membership was estimated to only be 10 percent among workers by 1900.
    Many people, like those in the book I am assigned to for class, say that people were intimidated into not joining unions. Many women during the time period were sexually abused by their bosses and they were afraid that if they said anything that they wouldn't be able to find a job to feed their children.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCaliforniaLife View Post
    Many people, like those in the book I am assigned to for class, say that people were intimidated into not joining unions. Many women during the time period were sexually abused by their bosses and they were afraid that if they said anything that they wouldn't be able to find a job to feed their children.
    Sounds similar to China's situation now. The solution could easily be to simply stop trying to move up in status. The farmers always seem most happy. They have family, food, and usually the innovation to furnish whatever else they may need. Instead of attacking the government, I'd criticize the culture at that time.

    Whatever the people do, it is voluntary, unless they truly are being physically forced into the action. All voluntary business transactions must be perceived by both parties as mutually beneficial or it either wouldn't happen or wouldn't be voluntary, so the argument that there is even anything necessarily wrong with working conditions in the Gilded Age is absurd.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by TheCaliforniaLife View Post
    I'm a hardcore Ron Paul and Mises/CATO supporter. I'm taking this class in college called the History of the Gilded Age. We are learning about the living and working conditions for many immigrants and freed blacks during the 70/80s. Was the government at fault? Was capitalism at fault? How was class mobility? I don't just want to get my classroom's bias on the issue.
    The biggest mistake people make is comparing living/working conditions during the Gilded Age to living/working conditions afterwards, when we should instead be comparing them to living/working conditions beforehand. The Industrial Revolution was what marked our transformation from subsistence-level conditions to more comfortable conditions, and the subsequent Gilded Age marked the rapid, steady growth of industry and its increasing impact on our lives.

    During the Gilded Age, modern industry was just then emerging from its infancy. As Petar implied, the Gilded Age also followed the Reconstruction era, which meant much of the time, money, and effort was essentially spent recovering what was lost by the waste and destruction of the Civil War. In any case, child labor and long workdays were not "new" things to the Gilded Age but rather continuations of conditions from farm life before the Industrial Revolution. People didn't move to cities and work in sweatshops because they had to; people moved to cities and worked in sweatshops because they were significantly better options than working on farms! There was an enormous supply of willing workers, but the industrial economy was still small compared to later periods, so these workers were all competing for a relatively small number of positions. The imbalance of labor demand and supply led to sweatshops.

    Such sweatshops are a natural part of an emerging economy's growing pains, but the production they enable is their own solution: They result in rapidly decreasing prices and therefore rapid improvements to people's buying power and living conditions. Those improvements in turn lead to more consumer demand, enabling the creation of more businesses and sweatshops...and the more there are, the less the conditions start to resemble sweatshops at all. (Note that China is preventing this: They deliberately depreciate their currency and keep it pegged to the dollar to counteract its otherwise growing buying power. This is how China's elites can keep the common people in eternal sweatshop poverty, for their own benefit. This can only continue so long as there's enough demand from international consumers though.)

    Over time, as people's buying power increases, they do not need to work so hard to survive, and over longer periods of time, people do not need to work so hard to even live in comfort. Along with the growth of available positions, this buffer gradually gives people more of an incentive to hold out for better pay and working conditions, and this reluctance to "settle" puts pressure on employers to start competing for more reluctant labor. Over time, pay increases, workdays shorten, and job safety becomes a larger concern. This increasing market demand for better conditions also leads to the formation of labor unions.

    Of course, the shift from sweatshops to modern conditions didn't happen as quickly as people might have wanted. Part of this was because the Gilded Age itself was not a time of pure laissez-faire economics anyway (note the above mention of sexual abuse by employers, etc.), but a large part was natural. Comparing their own lifestyles to those of industry tycoons upset ordinary people, and this and a lack of economic understanding led to political pressure for better pay, shorter workdays, industry regulations, antitrust laws, etc. These kind of laws were enacted during the same time period that increasing abundance began to put economic pressure on the same conditions anyway. Were this not the case, these laws may have been disastrous, but because it was the case, history was written from the [wrong] point of view that these laws saved us from the jaws of sweatshop poverty.

    There's a lot on the subject, both opinion and economic analysis, but that's as much as I have time to bloviate about right now.
    Last edited by Mini-Me; 10-18-2010 at 02:37 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by President John F. Kennedy
    And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. That we are only 6% of the world's population, and that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind. That we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.
    I need an education in US history, from the ground up. Can you help point me to a comprehensive, unbiased, scholarly resource?

  9. #8
    LibForestPaul
    Member

    fascism. it was not a free market. industries colluded and used force to shut out competitors.
    the unions were a response from the workers to use force against those who subjugated them.



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  11. #9
    LibForestPaul
    Member

    China is a gross abomination of what happened here. Bribes, forced labor, on top of no private property of even the individual.



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