[zaarn]

Well, there was America's gilden age, which was also present in wide areas of Europe; Factory Owners would get all of the money and the workers got almost nothing. In Germany this was so bad that children over the age of about 12 generally worked in the factory along with the entire family to be able to affort a 10sqm single room housing in the city with 2 meals a day.

The factory owners largely didn't care and caused quite a few large scale accidents facing little to no consequence for it.

That only changed in Europe after strikes, unions and socialist programs got punched through (also stuff like the 48 hour work week, 2 days of rest a week, sickdays, social welfare and healthcare and a lot of other stuff that was largely not capitalistic in nature), in the US only after anti-monopoly rulings where deployed en masse (while still paying out the factory owners shitloads of money).

[darawk]

Yep, that's true. Unfettered capitalism is not without its flaws. But it's still the only thing that has ever lifted large numbers of people from poverty in the entirety of human history.

[zaarn]

It also kept large numbers of people on the verge of starving while working themselves to death.

[darawk]

It didn't keep those people anywhere. They were free to go live as hunter-gatherers whensoever they chose. They chose not to do that, because they believed that working was a better life.

[zaarn]

In later stages it actually did keep those people there because they either couldn't afford to leave the city without half the family starving and/or militia hired by the factory owner enforcing people stayed there.

[darawk]

> militia hired by the factory owner enforcing people stayed there.

That isn't capitalism.

> In later stages it actually did keep those people there because they either couldn't afford to leave the city without half the family starving

I'm not sure what that means. Cities weren't that big. Just walk out and go live on some uninhabited BLM land if you don't want to participate in the capitalist economy.

[zaarn]

>That isn't capitalism.

Well, everything was steered by capital that the factory owners had.