Take everything you thought you knew about Adam Smith and his contemporaries and capitalism and throw it in the crapper.
According to Yasha Levine, the new book by Prof. Michale Perelmen, The Invention of Capitalism, shows what these Enlightened Ones really thought about industrialization and the poor, working class -- simply by quoting them! (Gee, whoda thoughta doin' dat?!)
Now I'm not saying let's throw over the West to Marxism -- the likely throw-away retort of my would-be antagonists. No. But I am saying, once again: there never was a golden age. Our predecessors were almost always worse than we were, if not in words and refined manners then in thoughts and deeds. (Think four-year-olds in factories; slavery; debtors' prisons; woman as second-class citizens, etc.) And this is why conservatism is fundamentally wrong: there is not much good in history to harken back to. The past is darkness illuminated only by occasional stars. There is only forward, forward, to a perfection of human society.
And that is why Progressivism is where it's at: reining in capitalism's abuses and taming the corporations who have no allegiance to humanity, only the bottom line, because -- unlike our friend Mitt maintains -- they are not people. We are the people. And if we want corporations to act more like people, then we need government to force them. That is the undeniable vector of political economy over the past 200 years, and that's where history is inevitably taking us further, whether Tea Parties like it or not.
But to perfect ourselves we have to acknowledge our ugly qualities -- many of them inherited from even uglier forbears -- in the mirror. So read this and get yerselves edumacated, folks.
By Yasha Levine
April 5, 2012 | The Exiled
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