[anthonyb]

There was a society based on the principles of the free market - Victorian England. It wasn't so great for most of the population there - pitiful wages, child labour, pollution, poor houses, squalour and misery.

Free market? Sure, it's a great idea, but minimum wage laws, workplace safety, pollution control and so forth have all done just as much for our health and prosperity.

[zeteo]

Are you kidding me? Victorian Britain was the most prosperous country on Earth, at the time. Sure, the average Brit had it much rougher than they do today, but that's not a valid comparison. Give me one country that had it better during the 19th century than Victorian Britain!

[anthonyb]

Sure, they were more prosperous on average, but the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas.

It's also impossible to say whether the prosperity was due to the free market and lack of regulations, the industrial revolution and development of steam power or the rise of the middle class and their increased free time/income.

I suspect that mostly it was technology, similar to what's happening in developing nations right now, rather than any free markets.

[zeteo]

"the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas."

Do you have any support for that assertion? The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary. Yes, in the city they were also much more visible to literate observers who would write about their misery, but who knows what those same observers might have exposed if they had lived in a village instead. The people who knew both sides of the situation, certainly seemed to vote with their feet for the industrialized cities. We see the same phenomenon at work in China nowadays.

[_delirium]

> The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time

In many cases they hardly "decided"; they were en masse kicked off the land, so had no real choice. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

[zeteo]

That's the standard Marxist analysis, but it's been refuted since, by Armstrong and others. The Enclosure Acts "kicked" very few people off the land. What they did mostly was to transform poorly utilized common land (marginal pasture, forests, and even some "tragedy of the commons"-style arable land) into extremely productive privately owned plots. The food production increased immensely as a result, which allowed bustling cities and industries to be well supplied. The general prosperity of society increased immensely, while previously starving peasants moved into the cities to become well-fed, but poorly-housed, poorly-clothed etc. workers (at least in the first generation). Even these deficiencies were remedied quite fast, and by the end of the Victorian period, manual laborers would commonly go around town dressed in what today we'd call a business suit.

[_delirium]

I'm not arguing that the Enclosure Acts reduced the prosperity of society in aggregate, merely that one of their direct results was that "previously starving peasants moved into the cities" wasn't a free choice on the part of the peasants in many cases. They may have even ended up better off in doing so, but that's different from whether it was voluntary. I don't think you need a Marxist analysis to come to the conclusion that the Enclosure Acts didn't have a neutral effect on the pace of urbanization; it's what you find in standard mainstream histories from folks like Spielvogel as well.

Mostly I don't think it's at all clear that "being poor in the city working in a factory" would actually be preferred over "being a peasant farmer" given conditions of the time, if it were truly a free choice. In the United States at around the same time, you find many people choosing to leave cities to become subsistence farmers on the frontiers, because the Homestead Acts made it a viable option. If the UK had taken the enclosed land and distributed it via a Homestead-Act style process, would British peasants have chosen that option?

[anthonyb]

Happy, well-fed, unevicted peasants don't riot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Enclosure_riots

And people in the east end of London were most certainly not well fed: http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/chapter25...

Please try not to be so knee-jerk dismissive of everything that doesn't fit into your free market viewpoint.

[anthonyb]

> The poor themselves decided en masse to move from village to city at the time, which seems to indicate the contrary.

You have the same mechanism at work today, in slums in India, South America and so on. The draw is the possibility of being better off and having more opportunity than you would in a rural area, but it doesn't always end up that way.

But we're getting off the point, which is that a free market doesn't give you "unprecedented human health and prosperity" - the best that you can argue is that it's one of the preconditions (but not the only one).

[anthonyb]

> Do you have any support for that assertion?

How about an eyewitness account, from 1902:

http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/

[dstorrs]

Victorian England is definitely a good candidate, yes. But for an example of a "free market" society that is nearer in time and space to modern Americans, read Upton Sinclair's _The Jungle_ : http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Jungle/Upton-Sinclair/e...

[jacoblyles]

You couldn't pass a minimum wage law in Victorian Britain that would raise the Victorians' living standards to that of today. Labor simply wasn't productive enough to sustain living standards like ours. People were poor because society as a whole was poor.

All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve. However, increases in labor productivity shift that curve outward (this is usually because of technological progress and capital investment). It is because capitalism has shifted the curve outwards over time that we are so much more wealthy, not because minimum wage laws have slightly shifted our position along the curve.

If labor productivity weren't near as high as it is, then you could pass all the laws and regulations in the world and it wouldn't make us as rich as we are now. Anti-capitalists fundamentally misunderstand the process of wealth creation.

I suggest you also look up my comments on the ill-argued anti-libertarian "Victorian England" blogpost that I am assuming you are referencing from when it was submitted here.

[anthonyb]

Nobody said anything about raising living standards to that of today. I'm not sure exactly how you got there, and I'm also not sure how you or the overcoming bias article you linked got to free markets causing the reduction in poverty. The free market's been around for a bit longer than six years, so I'd say it's more likely to be a rise in technology (particularly mobile phones and solar power) rather than global capitalism.

And never mind a minimum wage law - Victorian England would've been a much more pleasant place with some sort of health and safety law, restrictions on child labour or a functioning welfare system other than slave labour in the poor house. Did you read the People of the Abyss link that I posted earlier? There's some scary stuff in there:

I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British Alkali Chemical Works. I was working in a shed, and I had to cross the yard. It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light about. While crossing the yard I felt something take hold of my leg and screw it off. I became unconscious; I didn't know what became of me for a day or two. On the following Sunday night I came to my senses, and found myself in the hospital. I asked the nurse what was to do with my legs, and she told me both legs were off.

There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and 15 inches wide. The crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute. There was no fence or covering over the hole. Since my accident they have stopped it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of sheet iron . . . . They gave me £25. They didn't reckon that as compensation; they said it was only for charity's sake. Out of that I paid £9 for a machine by which to wheel myself about.

(from http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/chapter17...)

25 pounds is about 6 months wages for the loss of both legs, and he has to buy his own wheelchair! How much productivity was lost to society because that factory and others like it didn't take enough care of its workforce? And yet you and the rest of the HN libertarian echo chamber are trying to convince us that the only thing necessary for happiness is a free market?

Give me a break.

[Tycho]

From what I understand, there were child labour laws, and when they passed the result was that children were no longer able to work in the respectable factories, so instead they ended up in dangerous, illegal establishments. Of course, child labour in general was nothing new.

[_delirium]

All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve.

That's not the only thing it does, depending on the elasticity of various prices and wages. Another thing it does in some situations is increase the total share of money going to laborers while decreasing profit margins of their employers. This may or may not lead to the employer laying them off, depending on what the profit margins were to begin with; if they were very high, such that the post-increase margins are still nice (just not as nice), it's still rational to continue to employ the newly more expensive labor.

Consensus among economists these days on minimum wages is a lot more nuanced than it might've been 50 years ago, anyway. A majority of economists still think that they're on the whole a bad idea, but most would want to know what kind of economy you're talking about before giving specific predictions about their effects. The fundamental shift driving the "well, generally X, but it depends" view is a realization that economies can be quite far from classical equilibria, for quite long periods of time, in which case policies don't necessarily have the effects classical economics would predict.