On Sep 2, 8:52Â am, ZerkonX
X.net> wrote:
> Industrialization was built on system of cheap labor and urban squalor.
Cheap labor and urban squalor existed before industrialization.
Industrialization didn't cause it - except later under communism (and
to which add mass famine to the mix of consequences).
Industrialization in fact made possible a substantial improvement in
standard of living to a degree unparalled in history - and it wasn't
just a vast increase in the middle class. It was also an improvement
for workers. To whom do you think capitalists were selling the
products they were manufacturing? Who was riding on the trains? Or
travelling on the steamships - and later flying in the planes? Who was
buying the clothes, the books, the household goods - and later, the
indoor plumbing, refrigerators, telephones, radios, etc. etc. etc etc.
What do you think the concept "mass market" refers to?
> It is what the US and most of Europe is living off of today.
You could just as easily say that the rest of the world is living off
of us.
>Most, not all, of the Sweat shops and the slavery have simply moved off-shore.
Oh, please. Conditions for overseas workers are not comparable to our
own, true. But their alternative is plodding in rice fields, begging
in the streets, or prostitution. If their gov'ts allow their markets
to be free and competitive, their living standards will grow as ours
did (and in many cases that is happening, such as in the former
communist slave states.)
> Capitalism did not create 'electricity' nor did it create 'the telephone'...
No, it merely by pure coincedence happened to have developed in a
capitalist country. Gee.
Those and 1,000's of other groundbreaking technological advances.
Pure chance.
Fred Weiss
