I would be very surprised if careful research of the history of this Oregon statute did not reveal a producer group — or producer groups — who benefitted materially from the minimum-wage-induced stifling of competition.
The logic of such rent-creating legislation is plain: producer group A competes for many of the same customers against producer group B. Producer group A, however, uses for its production a mix of inputs (most importantly, capital and labor) that differs from the mix used by producer group B. Also, producer group B might compete most effectively against producer group A not by producing outputs as nearly identical as possible to that of A but, instead, by producing “substitute” goods or services that sell at prices lower than those charged by producer group A.
For example, producer group A might consist of locally owned restaurants with tablecloths and serving food freshly prepared by skilled chefs, while producer group B consists of chain restaurants serving food less exquisite but priced much lower. Members of producer group A are upset that producer group B is competing successfully for some diners who would likely otherwise eat more frequently at the restaurants of producer group A. What are the members of producer group A to do?
They could accept the fact that competition is not tortious — indeed, that economic competition is healthy for the economy at large — and do nothing other than compete harder to win more consumer patronage. That’d be the honest and honorable path to take. But government is in the picture, standing ready to escort those with little interest in honesty and honor down the rent-seeking path.
“So just pass legislation outlawing chain restaurants in our state,” suggests the leader of producer group A.
“Wish I could,” responds Sen. Slimey, “but that’s too blatant. Plus, it might not pass muster with the courts. But I’ve got an alternative plan that’s just as good.”
“Do tell!” exclaims the leader of producer group A.
“Well, I understand,” replies Sen. Slimey, “that the restaurants run by producer group B use many more low-skilled workers in their kitchens than your restaurants use.”
“That’s correct. We serve only fine food, so we hire experienced, high-skilled chefs, whose market wages are high.”
“So,” observes Sen. Slimey, “let’s enact a statute that raises the minimum wage above the average wage now paid to the average worker in producer group B’s restaurants, but lower than the average wage paid to workers in your — producer group A’s — restaurants.”
“Brilliant!” declares the leader of producer group A, who sees immediately that, while the minimum-wage legislation will on its face — de jure — apply to all restaurants, it will in fact have a differentially harsh effect on the restaurants in producer group B. The minimum wage will artificially raise producer group B’s costs of operation, causing them to reduce their outputs. One consequence of producer group B’s reduced outputs will be artificially increased demand for meals served at producer group A’s restaurants.
Sen. Slimey smiles, knowing that the news media, as well as most of the intellectuals in town, will applaud him for his apparent humanity and “Progressive” values. It’s a win-win for Sen. Slimey and for members of producer group A. And too few people will pay close-enough attention to the members, workers, and customers of producer group B to suspect that Sen. Slimey is anything other than a socially conscious public servant.
Don Boudreaux, “Doing Bad By Pretending to Do Good”, Café Hayek, 2018-05-13.
August 20, 2020
QotD: Manipulating minimum wage laws to harm your competitors
August 19, 2020
He calls it “unintended consequences”. I disagree … these consequences are very much intended
Brad Polumbo is being far too generous to Californian politicians by saying the impending collapse of the state’s entire gig economy was not the intended result of passing “worker protection” laws that penalized success:
UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.
Here’s how we got to this point.
In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.
Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.
Here’s why.
AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.
Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”
Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.
August 18, 2020
Don’t worry your pretty little heads, normies, the enlightened ones are planning “The Great Reset” for 2021
Mark Steyn on how the great and the good of the world are figuring out the road ahead of us:
… most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you’ve never heard of — by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids’ schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.
A lot of those chaps you’ve never heard of turn up in this video from the “World Economic Forum” — ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you’ll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of “The Great Reset”:
I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the “World Leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ Plan“. But, if by “leader” you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it’s a melancholy reflection on the state of “world leadership” that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people’s representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he’s just another guy who’s a “world leader” because he gets invited to Davos and you don’t — and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you’d need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world’s airports are ghost towns.
As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. “Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis,” says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren’t closed.
But, why is it history’s job to say something about this crisis? Why, don’t you “world leaders” of the here and now say anything about it? “It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world,” declares the UN Secretary-General.
That’s almost a full set, but he forgot “redefined”. “Possibilities are being redefined each and every day,” says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he’s in any business other than petroleum.
There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the “China Green Finance Committee”. He’s there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis – and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I’ve mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing — from widgets to “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts, that’s never coming back; from now on, we’re going to be “the knowledge economy”. Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.
August 16, 2020
This is a “hockey stick” graph you can believe
Brian Micklethwait says this graph, unlike the more famous (debunked) “hockey stick”, shows one of the most important moments in human history:
If that graph, or another like it, is not entirely familiar to you, then it damn well should be. It pinpoints the moment when our own species started seriously looking after its own creature comforts. This was, you might say, the moment when most of us stopped being treated no better than farm animals, and we began turning ourselves into each others’ pets.
Patrick Crozier and I will be speaking about this amazing moment in the history of the human animal in our next recorded conversation. That will, if the conversation happens as we hope and the recording works as we hope, find its way to here.
I’m not usually one for podcasts, in the same way that I’m not an audiobook user: I find I’m unable to do other things while listening to the spoken word, and it’s always far faster to read a text than to have it read to you. In this particular case, I might try to make an exception, and give up hope of doing anything else productive while I listen.
August 15, 2020
QotD: The worth of a human being
According to this article, the worth of a human being was 98 cents. The authors showed how their figure was arrived at. They had combined current market prices for the materials in an average human frame of 130 pounds. (Details like this I remember.) A sceptic, even then, I recall noting that they excluded hat, mid-season clothing, and shoes, from their total; and that they didn’t mention whether they were citing wholesale or retail values on the flesh and chemicals. Most pointedly, while accompanying my mother to a supermarket, I checked the prices for beef, pork, and broiler chicken, choosing the lowest grades. All were over 10 cents a pound; and so I concluded that the overall price of the meat alone, per human, would exceed their estimate.
Given background inflation rates, I think the total value in 2020 may approach twenty dollars, or even twenty-five. I’d have to recheck chemical prices, to be sure. Though perhaps the total might be reduced, closer to one dollar again, for babies.
David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.
August 12, 2020
QotD: The circle of recycled life
2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U.S. Post Office.
3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. Post Office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.
4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.
5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.
6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.
7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.
8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.
9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.
10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into … recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements “Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.
Gerard VanderLeun, “The Circle of Recycled Life”, American Digest, 2018-06-01.
August 10, 2020
The Rise of Carthage
Invicta
Published 13 Mar 2020Support the channel by downloading Rise of Kingdoms: http://patron.me/Invicta, New users can use the code
seyfpw6fxuand claim these prizes: GEM 200, Silver Key x2, 50000 Food x2, 50000 Wood x2Today Carthage is remembered only in the context of its dramatic fall at the end of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. We all know about Hannibal and the Battle of Cannae but how about the daily life of Carthage. There is much more to this ancient civilization than the dust and ashes left to us by history. Today we will be exploring the Rise of Carthage and dive into the fascinating details of their civilization.
The history documentary begins by covering the ancient Phoenicians who planted colonies across the Mediterranean. Carthage emerged from this trade network to become the leader of the Phoenicians in the west and eventually come to forge an empire when its mother colony Tyre declined. The history documentary then turns to cover the government, economy, culture, and military of ancient Carthage.
Sources and Suggested Reading:
Carthage: A History by Serge Lancel
The Carthaginians by Dexter Hoyos
Carthage’s Other Wars by Dexter Hoyos
Carthage Must be Destroyed by Richard Miles#History
#Documentary
#Carthage
FDR’s “New Deal” and the Great Depression
The Great Depression began with the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and was made worse by the frantic attempts of President Hoover to fix the problem. Despite the commonly asserted gibe that Hoover tried laissez faire methods to address the economic crisis, he was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive and a life-long control freak (the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which devasted world trade was passed in 1930). Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election by promising to undo Hoover’s economic interventions, yet once in office he turned out to be even more of a control freak than Hoover. His economic and political plans made Hoover’s efforts seem merely a pale shadow.
For newcomers to this issue, “New Deal” is the term used to describe the various policies to expand the size and scope of the federal government adopted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a.k.a., FDR) during the 1930s.
And I’ve previously cited many experts to show that his policies undermined prosperity. Indeed, one of my main complaints is that he doubled down on many of the bad policies adopted by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
Let’s revisit the issue today by seeing what some other scholars have written about the New Deal. Let’s start with some analysis from Robert Higgs, a highly regarded economic historian.
… as many observers claimed at the time, the New Deal did prolong the depression. … FDR and Congress, especially during the congressional sessions of 1933 and 1935, embraced interventionist policies on a wide front. With its bewildering, incoherent mass of new expenditures, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and direct government participation in productive activities, the New Deal created so much confusion, fear, uncertainty, and hostility among businessmen and investors that private investment, and hence overall private economic activity, never recovered enough to restore the high levels of production and employment enjoyed in the 1920s. … the American economy between 1930 and 1940 failed to add anything to its capital stock: net private investment for that eleven-year period totaled minus $3.1 billion. Without capital accumulation, no economy can grow. … If demagoguery were a powerful means of creating prosperity, then FDR might have lifted the country out of the depression in short order. But in 1939, ten years after its onset and six years after the commencement of the New Deal, 9.5 million persons, or 17.2 percent of the labor force, remained officially unemployed.
Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Professor Vincent Geloso also finds that FDR’s New Deal hurt rather than helped.
… let us state clearly what is at stake: did the New Deal halt the slump or did it prolong the Great Depression? … The issue that macroeconomists tend to consider is whether the rebound was fast enough to return to the trendline. … The … figure below shows the observed GDP per capita between 1929 and 1939 expressed as the ratio of what GDP per capita would have been like had it continued at the trend of growth between 1865 and 1929. On that graph, a ratio of 1 implies that actual GDP is equal to what the trend line predicts. … As can be seen, by 1939, the United States was nowhere near the trendline. … Most of the economic historians who have written on the topic agree that the recovery was weak by all standards and paled in comparison with what was observed elsewhere. … there is also a wide level of agreement that other policies lengthened the depression. The one to receive the most flak from economic historians is the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). … In essence, it constituted a piece of legislation that encouraged cartelization. By definition, this would reduce output and increase prices. As such, it is often accused of having delayed recovery. … other sets of policies (such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act) … were very probably counterproductive.
Here’s one of the charts from his article, which shows that the economy never recovered lost output during the 1930s.
August 9, 2020
QotD: The economic concept of “revealed preferences”
Now, you can’t help but notice that there is a disparity between those who say that taxes should be higher and those who act as if they should be. Clearly, an individual who really believes that the Government is more effective at spending his money would voluntarily offer up more than the legal minimum of taxation. That we have fewer people acting in this manner than are to be found writing columns and making speeches calling for higher taxation shows a certain gap, does it not, between public utterances and private actions? Why, we could make such donations a litmus test for those believers in higher taxation and state spending who want to compel all of us to pay more. Only those who show their commitment by sending a cheque to the Treasury should be treated seriously.
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.
Tim Worstall, “Show us your cheques”, Times of London, quoted in Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-07.
August 8, 2020
QotD: The British Empire
Conquest empires rarely outlive their founders, or only last a few generations. Alexander’s generals, or Charlemagne’s children and grandchildren, dividing and subdividing into smaller and smaller units, is the norm for such empires. (If not straight collapse when the dictator holding it all together vanishes.)
The only “conquest” empires that have held up are those that send settlers into the lands of hunter-gatherers or nomads. The United States, Russia and Australia being good examples. (But the only reason they can hold up is if the captured territory can be converted into a functional part of the state and society … something the US and Australia have largely managed … Russia’s attempts to enforce this unity by repression of its more developed conquered peoples have not been so successful over the last few centuries, and it is unlikely that China will do much better long-term no matter how much repression it introduces into its recent conquests of established societies like Tibet and the Uyghurs.)
Which leaves only trade empires as potentially successful long term options. And only because their success is not measured by sustaining the political unity of the “empire”, but by sustaining its economic goals.
The most successful empire in world history is the British empire, which could delightedly declare itself obsolete in the 1920s, and again (after having to work mostly co-operatively to fight World War Two) in the 1950s. Both times it encouraged the member states to go look after themselves (some successfully and some less so), and yet it still managed to leave an almost completely secure legacy for its existence … relatively safe international free trade routes. (The almost complete elimination of both piracy and slavery worldwide just being minor side benefits of the British Empire.)
For an empire developed “in a fit of absent mindedness”, and as a byproduct of trying to develop free trade around the world: the measure of success has to be the Commonwealth of Nations – comprising 54 nations with about 1/3 of the world’s population, getting together to play cricket every year and hold a Commonwealth Games every 4 years.
This is not an empire that copllapsed, or was destroyed. This is an empire that over a century or so (from granting independent Dominion status to Canada in 1886 [Canadians stoutly maintain it was 1867], Australia 1901, New Zealand and South Africa pre-Great War, Ireland and Egypt interwar, India and Pakistan post war, large parts of Asia and Africa in the 60s and 70s etc.); nonetheless developed and secured the international free trade system that the world has embraced. (Including a re-integration by an early exit-er from the empire … the 13 out of 35 British north American colonies that became the United States … and who finally inherited the title of world policeman when the rest of the Commonwealth nations had got sick of the whole thing.)
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
August 6, 2020
Post WWII United Kingdom – Cold War Documentary
The Cold War
Published 11 Apr 2020Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the post-World War II situation in the United Kingdom
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar or Paypal: http://paypal.me/TheColdWar
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August 5, 2020
Red Toryism, limited government and other Canadian political sinkholes
In his latest article in The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden talks about the political void where most Canadian conservatives keep their notions about what “conservatism” actually means in the Canadian context:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
This passage is from the Red Toryism essay:
Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.
This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm.
While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.
Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.
Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money.
In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials.
In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts.
It’s a rare Canadian conservative who’s willing to be quoted as saying that any part of human life is not automatically part of the remit of the federal government … how do you carve a “limited” government philosphy out of that?
August 3, 2020
Recycling is a SCAM!
J.J. McCullough
Published 29 Jun 2019Recycling is a disaster. This video was sponsored by Loonie Politics! Sign up using the code word “McCullough” for 25% off! https://looniepolitics.com/register/
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Romanticizing the past
Sarah Hoyt points out that the past really is a foreign country and they do things very differently there … and for good reasons:
An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.
So, quickly: The industrial revolution was not a disaster to your average peasant. It was a disaster for landowners.
Yes, yes, the conditions in the factories were terrible. By our standards. The lifespan was very short. By our standards. The anomie of the big cities, yadda yadda. When compared to what? Small villages? Ask those of us raised in them. Yes, there was child labor. As compared to what at that time? Other than the life of the upper classes?
Look, we don’t have to guess about this stuff. In India, in China, in other places that came to the industrial revolution very late, we’ve seen peasants leave the land where their ancestors had labored, to flock to the big cities, to take work we find horrible and exploitative at wages we find ridiculous.
And even if China has added “labor camp” and prisoner wrinkles to it, note that’s because China is a shitty communist country, not because the migration wasn’t there before. Also the labor camp aspects, as much as one can tell (and it’s hard to tell, due to the raging insanity of the regime) seem to have grown as the people grew more prosperous, as a result of the industrial revolution and thereby demanded higher wages, which positioned China more poorly as the “factory of the world.”
In fact, idealizing “living off the land” has been in place since at least the Roman empire, and probably before. It’s also been MISERABLE at least since then and probably before.
Because pre-industrial revolution farming sucked. It sucked horribly. And it kept you on the edge of subsistence. It double sucked when you were subjected to a Lord. Look, systems of serfdom, etc. didn’t come about because living in a Lord’s domain was so great, and everyone wove wreaths and danced around maypoles all the time, okay?
The bucolic paradise of a farmer’s life was mostly a creation of city dwellers, often noblemen, who saw it from the outside.
There are estimations that most people had trouble rearing even one child, and most of one generation’s peasants were people fallen from higher status. I don’t know. That might be exaggerated. Or it might not.
Even during the industrial revolution, it was normal for ladies bountiful to take baskets of food to tenant farmers because … they couldn’t make it on their own.
And btw, the more the industrial revolution pulled people to the cities, the more the Lords and “elites” talked about how great the countryside was and how terrible the factories/cities/new way of living were.
A lot of artists and pseudo bohemians jumped in on this bandwagon and so did Marx, who was both a pseudo bohemian, by birth “elite” (Well, his family had a virtual slave attached to him. He impregnated her too, as was his privilege), and by self-flattery intellectual.
Therefore the factories were the worst thing ever, the men who owned them, aka capitalists were terrible, terrible people — mostly because Marx wasn’t one, and probably because they laughed at him — and the proletariat they exploited horribly would rise up and —
All bullshit of course. Later on his fiction needed retconning by Anthony Gramsci who, having the sense to realize the “workers” weren’t rising up, just getting wealthier and escaping the clutches of the “elites” more made the “proletariat” a sort of “world proletariat” centered on poorer/more dysfunctional countries. This had the advantage of making the exploited masses always be elsewhere (or the supposed exploiters) and therefore made it easier to pitch group against group to the eternal profit of rather corrupt “elites.” Mostly political classes which are descended from “the best people.”
August 2, 2020
Was Roman Concrete Better?
Practical Engineering
Published 29 Oct 2018Comparing modern concrete to that of the western Roman empire.
In this video, I discuss a few modern techniques that help improve design life of concrete, including roller compacted concrete (RCC) and water reducing admixtures (superplasticizers). There are a whole host of differences between modern concrete and that of the western Roman empire that I didn’t have time to go into, including freeze/thaw damage. This is such an interesting topic, so here are some references if you’d like to learn more:
– http://www.romanconcrete.com/
– https://www.usbr.gov/tsc/techreferenc…
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_c…-Patreon: http://patreon.com/PracticalEngineering
-Website: http://practical.engineeringTonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6fBP…
