We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day With hindsight it can be stated that the outcome of the Industrial Revolution was that human beings no longer needed to go out and grab other people’s possessions by force, but merely to settle down, work hard and exchange the considerable surplus they produced for something they wanted from the surplus someone else produced. How simple it all seems! Yet how hard to put into practice.
– Findlay Dunachie (1928-2005 – his funeral is today) in The Success of the Industrial Revolution and the Failure of Political Revolutions: How Britain Got Lucky, page 6, published in 1996 by the Libertarian Alliance.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
This isn’t a good time to quibble, I realise: but wasn’t it the slow development of agriculture, begining some 13,000 years ago, that actually established the ability to trade?
Or is my Neolithic history out of date?
GCooper: the vastly increased potential scale of trade following the IR is what is impressive, not simply trade per se.
mike writes:
“the vastly increased potential scale of trade following the IR is what is impressive, not simply trade per se.”
Perhaps. But that wasn’t the point I was responding toin the original post.
GCooper, interesting thought, but possibly not. The Hudson’s bay fur etc trade was huge with nary a speck of agriculture involved. It depended on trade and shipping infrastructure.
And while the development of agriculture was vitally important to the advancement of civilization, it took mechanization to bring it to full fruition.
Remember, for most of it’s history, agriculture relied on almost as many farmers as consumers. As an example, I live on a farm that my grandfather farmed well into the industrial age. It was about 55 acres and 12 to 15 cows when my grandfather farmed it. It took a family to run it. As recently as 15-20 years ago I farmed approximately 40 acres with a much greater yield, working by my self seasonally part time. I could plow in an afternoon what took my grandfather a week and required the ongoing care of horses year round.
In the early part of the twentieth century, reduction of labor was occurring all over this area as farms mechanized. Into this gap, General Motors brought a factory and hired all those kids that would have been pitching hay a generation earlier.
Now, farms are hundreds of acres, cows that used to give 3000 pounds of milk per year give 20,000. Corn fields that used to yield maybe 30 bushels/acre are now yielding 150. The GM plant employs thousands, and thousands more are employed in businesses that support GM and its employees through manufacturing, services, retail, etc. Our farms are far more productive than 80 years ago but we are also support a massive industrial production sector and an even bigger services sector.