A Question, Re-asked.

This is going to be a short blog post.  This is the first time I have ever directly addressed the few readers I have.  Not sure how many of you there are but it's enough to say that you would not fill a small theater.  With that, I have decided that I need to clear some time in order to attend to other projects in music and fiction writing.  I have tried to maintain two posts per week published on Tuesdays and Fridays, but now I am only going to publish on Tuesdays.  The two blog per week rate has become disruptive but once a week is very workable.

With that said, I have thought about what was said in the last post, specifically the question at the end regarding the pile of coal and the subsequent history of economic liberalism.  It is an open question.  Another way to put it might be:  What can be accounted for in terms of the institutions which rose alongside real, legally sanctioned advances in the liberties we now consider normal, whether they are civil, labor, or economic, which developed subsequently and logically from the great benefit of simply having machines do almost all the work for what ultimately became industrial capitalism.  And by work I mean physical work, not a job as, say, a cashier or a waiter.  Or even as a construction worker, because, even if workers wear out their bodies in the performance of the job, that effort is miniscule compared to the work the machines are doing.  To visualize the difference, imagine the amount of work a container ship from China is doing and what the same amount of work done by people swimming that distance with some sort of manufactured good in tow.  The number of people needed runs in the bajillions, and the only good thing to be said about this manner of oceanic trade is that it would be effective at creating full employment.

But think about the year 1776.  In that year came the American Declaration of Independence as well as the publication of "The Wealth of Nations".  Go back one year and you have the formation of the British company Boulton and Watt, by James Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, which made them both wealthy men.  In the space of a year you have three major components of economic liberalism in place.  The entire American experiment, as they sometimes call it (whoever "they" are), has occurred since then.  Of course, it's called an experiment for the reason that the founding of the government and the principles supporting it came out of the liberal notions of the time.  The entire American national experience is therefore not separable from liberalism or from the growth phase of capitalism. 

So then, what happens to the freedoms advanced during this time?  What are, in the words of the founders, the natural, inalienable rights in light of what sprang from the notions of natural rights as a part of the liberal philosophy?