The 1700 and 1800's - The Era of Misery

Whenever socialists talk about the relatively free period preceding the progressive era of the early 1900's, they always refer to it in the most extreme and denigrating terms. They want to paint a picture of death and disease, misery and ignorance, because if they mentioned the unprecedented and sustained economic growth and development that characterized the time period in question, they would have to admit that all the new federal agencies created as a result of their progressive movement were just superfluous and even possibly damaging to the economy.



But I'm not here to dispel the myth of that era as being without success, I'm here to ask leftists, if they think that era was so terrible and full of ignorance, why do they cling to the very federal constitution and government that was a product of the time? Shouldn't they be calling for the abolition of the federal government because of how old and stinky it is? I mean, it was a made by a bunch of rich old white men, many of which owned slaves and tons of land. Why are they so emotionally invested in their creation? Makes no sense!

 

Add smallpox, diphtheria, yellow fever, death in childbirth.............

 

Re: Post #2.

All addressed by advancing technology. Actually the earliest smallpox vaccines date back to the 1700s.

Yellow fever and malaria were definitely in retreat in the US by 1880, due to widespread drainage of swamps and decline in usage of cisterns and rain barrels. Gorgas and Walter Reed polished them off in the 1890s. The coming of the Iron Horse, with its need of very clean water defeated cholera. Once Pasteur indisputably demonstrated the bacterial cause of childbed fever, it disappeared overnight in the industrialized world.

The world was progressing quite nicely before the follies of the progressives came along.

 

Spare me .. My grandmother had diphtheria in the 1920s.. and I remember the polio epidemic of 1953.

 

Technology moves at its own pace. Hussein Obama and his acolytes cannot figure that out.

President Polk and General Worth both died of cholera after the Mexican War. By the Civil War, cholera was confined to west of the Hundredth Meridian. Cholera was largely gone in th US by 1900. In 1862, one of my forebears survived a Minie ball only to die (at home) of typhus. By the 1890s typhus was only seen in the poorest areas of Europe. By 1890, if an immigrant came from an area known to have typhus, they got a trip to Quarantine Island and got de-loused.

Progressive boondoggles had nothing to do with the defeat of cholera, typhus, diptheria, polio, or pneumonia.

 

Pretty one sided. GDP is a crap number when it comes to society as a whole, take a look at income inequality during those periods. Was pretty steep with a few families running what were damned near Monarchies in some parts of the nation. Led to a good portion of what causes the economy to collapse during the Great Depression.

 

Seems to me that the progressives came along when the free market had built up considerable wealth and started squandering it for the sakes of idealism and public manipulation in order to secure power.

 

America hating progressive leftist losers have Howard Zinn as their guide on the path of denegrateing their own country. The man was to historical writing and insight as field mice are to space exploration. These people are first and foremost self loathing haters. Every thing they say, think, and act upon is foundation by hate and hate alone. The problem is that it is braod as well. College professors in large part think like that, teach like that, and grade like that. We are great because we are free with liberty, those values are anathama to leftist losers.

 

And that happened because we a great nation with liberty and freedom? What a load of meaningless leftist loser hate. A bunch of progressive leftist MaO'Bama voters should move their happy asses to Liberia for a decade and they will kiss the ground on their return. Leftists need perspective.

 

It's all relative.

From our current perspective as First World citizens, most of human history could be seen as an era of misery.

Just having electricity and knowledge of microbes are relatively recent developments in our timeline.

Public education has a pretty short timeline as well.

Half of the population couldn't vote in most states until 1920.

About a third of the population was unable to use the same facilities as whites until the 60s.

So when it comes to quality of life for the average American, yes, there was plenty of misery up until a few decades ago.

Granted, there is still plenty of misery for the average world citizen when looking at the quality of life in much of the developing world.

As for the quality of life in the 1700s and 1800s, I guess it depends on what you're comparing it to and whose eyes you're seeing it through.

Being a black man in a Southern state (or even a Northern one really) in 1850 wouldn't be particularly favorable to life in 1800 in one. Being a white woman in the same time period is about the same.

But if we're comparing those years with today, all groups are going to view things more favorably with today's quality of life as compared to then -- even the ultrawealthy, because medical technology is vastly better (or existent for that matter).

Economically, you could say that industrialists were more free to treat their labor as they pleased in the 1800s, but I don't see that as a good thing for society overall.

 

Well, except for death in childbirth. It is impossible to prevent as there are so many variables on how a baby would die.

 

ROTFLMAO...That's rich coming from a right-winger.
You people have been living in the state of denial since November 2008.

 

So? Got nothing eh, well, who is surprised by that...just empty MaO'Bama voter intellectual void...

 

The number of people who died from AIDs back then was zero. You see why times matter?

The Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Rockefeller and carnegie funds. It was a fast growing time the saw the growth of all the best schools in the nation from private charity, etc... Things have slowed since then.

 

Actually, you appear to be incorrect, but that is what happens when one believes stereotypes.





Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business...y-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/

 

And today American still has some of highest infant mortality and lowest life expectancy in the developed world.

 

Your headline is actually pretty accurate even though you are completely deriding that position. This "socialist" would simply rather acknowledge that the advances of this period were matched by equally spectacular pitfalls and misery for the many. I don't believe in the mythology that the period from 1700-1913 was some great ascent to western capitalist apotheosis and that the period from 1913 to the present is a constant fall from grace into communist hell. I'll laugh at it, but I won't believe it. I'm sure you believe in the myth of laissez-faire from this period, that what you call "capitalism" was the simple result of producers and traders making the best of what they could make without gub'ment intervention and that people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to take the lead.

And that position is totally wrong. Do you really think that English peasants in the 1800s were so enthusiastic to give up their rural, communal lifestyle for below-subsistence wages in the dangerous factories set up by early capitalists? Hmmm, using Adam Smith's own estimates on Scottish factory wages, a factory-peasant could toil for three work days so he could afford commercially produced shoes...or he could make his own brogues using his own leather in a matter of hours and spend the rest of the time drunk as a skunk on ale. This really pissed off early capitalists, who were incensed that these peasants had exploitable resources lying fallow as well as the fact that they were self-sufficient and they had time on their hands on top of that. You can read pamphlets by Adam Smith and his contemporaries which amusingly show how him and his colleagues whined and complained about how peasants were too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them into a life of wage slavery. Hence, eventually you have philosophers, economists, politicians and businessmen advocating for government action to push the lazy peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-sufficiency. Game laws, the Inclosure Acts, etc. etc. etc.

So no, far from being laissez-faire, brutal government intervention was needed to originally uproot so many people and turn them into employees/consumers and to maintain "capitalism". There is no "laissez-faire" in the 18th and 19th centuries. Things only got better when normal people started organizing themselves and demanded a more equitable society.

 

Lmao, what an embarrassing thread. The real indicator of how well a country is doing is real gdp per capita. Yea, they increased their ability to eat and buy horses. Sounds like a great plan for us in the 21st century, lol.

 

Okay, it was the worst time period in American history, full of ignorance and disease, so why are you still clinging to their political system?

People don't get sick anymore?

 

I'm just trying to demonstrate economic growth on a large scale. I agree that GDP is limited in its ability to describe how the "average" person is fairing, but it does tell you some important information about the economy as a whole, namely, how large its output is and how fast it is growing over time.

The Great Depression is during the progressive era. Everything after the late 1800's in the US is the progressive era of government. You could even argue that Lincoln was the first true progressive and that the "civil war" was the beginning of progressive hegemony in the federal government.

 

I said I'm not here to dispel the myth that the 18th and 19th centuries were the worst periods in American history, I'm here to ask you why, if you think that era was so dismal, do you cling to a political system that was created by the elites of the day?

 

This is where you fail miserably. No one is saying they were dumb and didn't know what they were doing. They were at the forefront of technological innovation, education, economics, science, etc, etc. What's amazing is you think our knowledge in banking, economics, money, etc ended in 18th/19th century and that is the cult-like belief that we should all adhere to for the rest of eternity.

Just like everything else, people evolved and our knowledge of banking, money, and economics evolved. Also with new markets and new technological innovations, economic needs were changed.

It's hilarious how you think someone in the 18th century had everything figured out and everybody who currently studies economics doesn't know what they are talking about. Like economist haven't read the Wealth of Nations. That's one of the first books we read in Freshmen year econ classes.

 

Yes, things have changed, which begs the question: Why are you clinging to a political system that was created in the 1700's?

 

The system has changed a lot since the 1700's. Not sure what your point is. Even couple years after the Constitution they created the Supreme Court in order to decide what is law or not simply because of how interpretable the Constitution is.

 

First of all, I believe in democracy, a concept which was invented in ancient Greece and applied successfully to various states in India and Europe, like Switzerland. As for the Founders, it's not as if they are some monolithic group so it would be hard for me to say that I "thought they were right". I'm not a Federalist, in any case. And I support many of the later amendments that the so-called purists despise, like the 17th Amendment.