This was the Gilded Age, before government regulation and minimum wage. Before air conditioning, too, on the Florida West Coast. 150 cigars a day, and these were skilled workmen, Samuel Gompers called them “the Aristocracy of Labor”. One of my grandfathers might be in that picture, too.

We must never forget what our ancestors went through, because if we do, our descendants will be condemned to have to do it all over again.

His brothers, too. His father and his uncles. When young, they “shucked” coal. Which is, they manually separated the shale from the coal, picking the rock from moving conveyor belts that would eat them as easily as it ate the guts of the mountain. Great-grandma was married three times, lost ‘em all to the mines. One was injured on the job but died at home, so the company said his widow got zip, since he didn’t die on the job. She had to remarry, all she had was company script, company home, company store, hungry children, and a hungry stove.

Those kids are my kin. In my blood. Is it any wonder I can only spend a couple o’ hours underground before I need sky? That I have a fondness for places I can see a horizon?

When I say grace, or what passes for it, I see this picture. I recall what they went through, what my parents went through, to provide the basis for what I’ve been through. Which is fucking nothing in comparison. And then I try to imagine where the food on my plate came from. I wonder about all the hardworking people who participated in provisioning my table. Truckers and packers, pickers and butchers, stockers and cashiers… Yeah, I also think about managers, accountants, CEOs and stockholders.

I’m doing okay. I owe it to those kids with the gloves in their hands. It humbles me.

It’s older than Babylon and evil as hell.

Straw man, eh? Who calls anyone who doesn’t accept his doctrine unconditionally a statist or a socialist?

“What TB fears is that ANY state power whatsoever will be a greater threat to human liberty than totally unrestrained private enterprise.”

“Any?” “Totally unrestrained?” This is, of course, a lie. The same straw man you keep desperately propping up.

As for your “evidence,” you can’t possibly be playing with a full deck if that’s your trump play on corporate inhumanity vs. state.

I think everyone here knows what kind of photos of state-sponsored cruelty I could put here. Hundreds. Some with the children still alive.

Apparently ER believes the greatest threat to human liberty in our time is unrestrained private enterprise. I submit it’s unrestrained state power. Which one of us does historical evidence bear out?

What TB fears is that ANY state power whatsoever will be a greater threat to human liberty than totally unrestrained private enterprise.

My historical evidence is the entrepreneurial paradise that stretched from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the Gilded Age and the “Statist” worker protection laws (and unions!) of the early 20th century.

This is what you really want TB, spare us the pious humbug about freedom and liberty.

The Republican program is to free business from regulation, taxes, litigation, and resistance from labor, and to ensure that the benefits of commerce and industry be primarily directed to those who own the means of production and control the institutions of trade and finance.

The Republican program is to reduce an ever-increasing burden of government controls and taxes that has wrecked economies across the world. Nobody has ever proposed removing all regulations, or all taxes. Straw man.

A major part of this program is to make the population totally dependent on them, without any alternatives, for income, and for all the necessities of life and the means to improve it, including health care, education, the safety net, and all social welfare.

Wow. I had to go over that more than once.

When you all read that sentence, how many people—besides ER—had “Republican” be the first party that popped into their head?

A major strategy in this effort is to portray the true creators of wealth, the workers whose hands and minds convert the world’s resources into goods and services, as a surly lot of lazy and untrustworthy louts who must be disciplined and guided to a useful life by an enlightened and dedicated management class, a business government elite who, of course, always knows best.

All I had to change was one word to make it true.

At the same time, those functions of government which directly benefit the interests of property and trade, such as the police, laws, courts, and military are to be provided with all the resources they require, at public expense. In addition, all governmental, social and cultural institutions must be privatized and commodified so that they become strictly commercial transactions, subject solely to their exploitation and profit.

“Public expense?” Where exactly is that “public” money coming from? Any actual tally of government services used by, say Microsoft, would be utterly dwarfed by the wealth pumped back into the local, state, and federal treasuries. This is not an opinion, this is math.

As with regulation, nobody has ever proposed turning over all government functions to the private sector. Some of them, yes. We did quite well in this country, in my own lifetime, with government that was considerably smaller, and had a lot fewer regulatory agencies.

The choice is not just between “bigger government” and “no government.” It never has been.

Apparently ER believes the greatest threat to human liberty in our time is unrestrained private enterprise. I submit it’s unrestrained state power. Which one of us does historical evidence bear out?

A major part of this program is to make the population totally dependent on them, without any alternatives, for income, and for all the necessities of life and the means to improve it, including health care, education, the safety net, and all social welfare.

A major strategy in this effort is to portray the true creators of wealth, the workers whose hands and minds convert the world’s resources into goods and services, as a surly lot of lazy and untrustworthy louts who must be disciplined and guided to a useful life by an enlightened and dedicated management class, a business elite who, of course, always knows best.

At the same time, those functions of government which directly benefit the interests of property and trade, such as the police, laws, courts, and military are to be provided with all the resources they require, at public expense. In addition, all governmental, social and cultural institutions must be privatized and commodified so that they become strictly commercial transactions, subject solely to their exploitation and profit.

Although it might conceivably be argued that some parts of this policy may not be without some benefit to the society as a whole, it seems obvious that the decision as to how public resources are allocated should not be left solely to those who plan to privately benefit from them, and whose self-declared and universally recognized interest is not that of the society in general, or even overall economic health and rationality, but purely their own.

In general, the Republican program is to return the nation, if not the world, to the same industrial and economic regime that existed throughout the 19th century, a system that siphoned off the majority of the great wealth produced by new technology directly into the hands of a very few, while the rest of the population was left to live in abject squalor and insecurity, simply a resource to be tapped, and then discarded when used up. For the executive elite, or those who have been deluded into thinking they are soon to become a part of it, the social universe is their playground, the field where they pursue their own self-aggrandizement. As far as they are concerned, the rest of us just work here.
We don’t really matter.

No one disputes the efficiency and productivity of free enterprise, or its role in creating and distributing great wealth and liberty for as many people as possible. But the plutocracy that wishes to monopolize this wealth for themselves will bitterly oppose any criticism of their actions, or any reforms, of the system which might conceivably frustrate their designs. There is nothing anyone can say, or any suggestion anyone can make, which they will not attack and attempt to discredit, and they will accept no course for civilization other than the one they have set. They will tell you the only two alternatives society has are Communist dictatorship, or their way, and that any objection whatsoever to their policy must therefore be a conspiracy sponsored by the other.

Do not believe this. They must not be allowed to get away with it.

Tell you what. Let’s do away with the concept of private property, pull out the incentive for greed, and see how many regulations are needed.

This harping about regulations when we’ve seen unregulated hedge fund activity almost wreck the economy, and the jury is still out on that, is really silly. And it’s getting even past silly.