It is a common myth to come across: rage by unions and liberals gave us the weekend. You see it in textbooks, you read about it in newspapers and you hear wacky leftist protesters shout about it at the top of their lungs.
Have you noticed all that rage coming from Antifa over the last 18 months? Well, all of Antifa’s behavior is justified because it will produce a utopia, a fantasy land where everyone gets something for nothing.
That’s according to Francesca Fiorentini, an online media personality.
Here is what she tweeted:
Let’s not equate left and right wing rage. Right-wing rage gave us the KKK, left-wing rage gave us the weekend.
— francesca fiorentini (@franifio) June 15, 2017
“Let’s not equate left and right wing rage. Right-wing rage gave us the KKK, left-wing rage gave us the weekend.”
Unfortunately, close to 20,000 people liked the tweet. Ignorance is abound.
Tom Woods, a prominent libertarian commentator, destroyed this argument:
First, that someone could be so juvenile as to think “rage” got us the weekend — as if people just aren’t angry enough in Bangladesh — and at the same time thinks she’s the smart and clever one, has to lower your estimate of mankind.
All those Third World countries need to escape poverty and enjoy additional leisure is…some labor unions?
(What’s the point of foreign aid, then?)
I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Left-wing rage gave us the Khmer Rouge, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, not to mention atrocities of all shapes and sizes all over the world.
The KKK in its entire existence did not kill as many people as did a communist regime on a good afternoon.
Even today, when the KKK barely exists, leftists are hysterical about it, even though its demonstrations consistently amount to 50 idiots being confronted by 1000 counter-demonstrators.
Yeah, scary.
As for the weekend, economics, more than “rage,” explains it. (She’s anti-science, too.)
Until society grows wealthy enough, all the rage in the world can’t make it possible to take two days a week off from work.
Can you imagine, in the primitive economies of 300 years ago, agitating for a shorter work week? People would have thought you insane.
With little capital, and with most goods produced by hand, it takes all the labor power all the hours it can spare just to make life barely livable.
That’s why people worked long hours in terrible conditions in the past (and why they do in the Third World today). Not because short men with white mustaches and a monocle took delight in oppressing them.
What emancipated people from these dehumanizing conditions was capital goods. With workers vastly more productive than before, thanks to the assistance of machines, physical output was multiplied in quantity and quality many, many times over. This greater abundance put downward pressure on prices relative to wage rates, and people’s standard of living rose.
At that time they opted for more leisure and more pleasant working conditions rather than more cash.
But if you ask people who work in sweatshops today if they’d rather have more pleasant conditions (or fewer working hours) and less take-home pay, they overwhelmingly say no.
Ben Powell of Texas Tech University actually bothered to ask. And 90+% of them said they wanted the money.
Meanwhile, American workers had the eight-hour-day well before their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe did, and they earned much higher wages. Unionism never accounted for more than a third of the American labor force, and that was at its height.
So no, screaming and protesting doesn’t actually create the wealth necessary to make leisure possible.
Slightly annoying to have to explain that, but on the other hand: how many kids get taught the correct analysis in school? All we get is low-IQ propaganda like this. “Er, if we want stuff, just pass a law!”
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