The Evils of Capitalism › American Greatness
Roger Kimball
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble as the things we do know that ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain (attributed)What’s the one thing everyone knows about capitalism? Why, that it started out as a mean, nasty tool of greedy industrialists, of course. “The Industrial Revolution,” we all learned, was a terrible Moloch that devoured children, put profits before people, and, though it made great fortunes (or, perhaps, partly because it made great fortunes), was a wicked development. The Industrial Revolution, we’ve all been taught, was the original sin of capitalism, necessary, perhaps, to prime the engine of economic progress, but lamentable nevertheless.
Ask anyone: the Industrial Revolution is a stigma that no amount of societal amelioration can remove. The “factory system,” an integral part of the Industrial Revolution, was an urban nightmare, a Dickensian melodrama in which rural innocence was mauled and blighted in those horrific, unsanitary “Satanic mills” that William Blake anathematized.
Once upon a time, before the advent of the factory system, workers enjoyed
a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life and all piety and probity; and their material condition was far better than that of their successors. . . . They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet they earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part beside in the recreation and games of their neighbours . . . [which] contributed to their physical health and vigour. . . . Their children grew up in fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally.more
https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/23/the-evils-of-capitalism/
