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Quote by: Voluntary You can expand on this idea if you'd like before you call me an idiot. I would like to hear what you have to say. |
Sorry about the ‘idiot’ thing… it didn’t quite come out the way I'd intended.
Anyway, as briefly as possible, that would be where Locke, Smith and Paine run into Charles Dickens.
You make a point that people are entitled to the fruits of their labors. Unfortunately, total laissez-faire is certainly more feasable in agrarian economies where people have access to property. In colonial America, 95% of the population lived on family farms, and business consisted of family owned shops, local craftsmen and small partnerships, while plantations, trading companies and ship building were the biggest concerns going. Many such businesses were available for a minimum of capital, and with a national border consisting of frontier wilderness, anyone, even a former indentured servant, could carve out as much property as he could hold onto.
Meanwhile, labor for the nation's major cash industries -- cotton, tobacco, sugar -- was handled by the greatest of all labor saving devices.... slaves.
With the industrial revolution comes mass production of goods and mass urbanization, as well as increased capitalization for factories and machinery. What then are the fruits of child labor, sweat shops, slave wages, dangerous and unhealthy factories, company stores, mining of industrial materials, etc. that become the lot of most workers? The fruits of property rights became the forbidden fruits of those lucky enough to actually own commercial property.
Suddenly to many people, and with good reason, Karl Marx looks far more attractive than Adam Smith.
Thus it becomes a role of the federal government to help make sure "The People" -- the ones doing the actual labor -- had their own fair shot at the pursuit of happiness. By 1900, the worst depradations of the Guilded Age and the Robber Barons has become targets for government reform and the beginnings of regulation, and the rest is history.
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I will. Where did anyone get the idea that Washington was not a Federalist?
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Alas, you missed out on the Golden Age of Volconvo's Libertarian Illuminati... Patrick Henry, Osborn F. Enready, Milton Bradley and Morgan Freeman. The first two in particular used to hold forth on threads that were essentially self-indulgent lecture series on Libertarianism. And George Washington was the last "Citizen President" for whom government that governed the least governed the best. As far as they were concerned,
Madison v. Marbury was the death knell of the original intent of the Constitution, and Washington the last great President.
Don't ask me to explain.
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