05-24-2016, 09:14 AM
Bureaucracies and regulation --
The first big assaults on pure, unscrupulous, exploitative capitalism were labor unions (largely a failure until the 1930s), and on the patent medicines and the use of child labor (great successes). Successful capitalists in other activities (like Rockefeller, Ford, and Edison) saw the patent medicine business as harmful to their profits. People were dying, becoming addicted, and going insane because of those horrible concoctions. The Pure Food and Drug Act required a disclosure of contents, and a public hostile to alcohol and opiates did not want them sold without justification. Big Business other than the patent medicine business and the medical profession wanted people to see a physician about some pain that just did not go away instead of self-medicating with some questionable panacea. If the physician says that one must use a narcotic for the pain, then so be it.
Child labor was cheap and pliant. It did not fit the consumer society emerging around 1900. Children's wages were not buying big-ticket items; they were replacing pay that their physically-wrecked parents could no longer earn because industrial workers of the time were generally worn out at age 35. Children working in mines and mills were especially vulnerable to industrial accidents, and about everyone knew that the work was stunting their development. The general abolition of child labor was associated with later ages of school-leaving and better working conditions for adults.
Enforcement of laws against patent medicines and against child labor was comparatively easy and not at all disruptive to the overall economy.
...I have a thread on the business life-cycle, and the final stage of business life is often a rigid bureaucracy. Highly-bureaucratized organizations tend to be terribly inefficient, inflexible, and lacking ability to innovate. Except in banking and insurance, where bureaucracy is a means of ensuring that payments go to the right people, bureaucracy generally creates barriers to progress. To be sure, there are people who prefer shuffling papers to doing real work, and they might prefer working for a company on life support to working where they need get tangible results... but in general if you see a company in its bureaucratic phase and you are a young adult, then maybe your degree is more useful elsewhere.
The biggest office building in the world is the Pentagon. That should say plenty.
The first big assaults on pure, unscrupulous, exploitative capitalism were labor unions (largely a failure until the 1930s), and on the patent medicines and the use of child labor (great successes). Successful capitalists in other activities (like Rockefeller, Ford, and Edison) saw the patent medicine business as harmful to their profits. People were dying, becoming addicted, and going insane because of those horrible concoctions. The Pure Food and Drug Act required a disclosure of contents, and a public hostile to alcohol and opiates did not want them sold without justification. Big Business other than the patent medicine business and the medical profession wanted people to see a physician about some pain that just did not go away instead of self-medicating with some questionable panacea. If the physician says that one must use a narcotic for the pain, then so be it.
Child labor was cheap and pliant. It did not fit the consumer society emerging around 1900. Children's wages were not buying big-ticket items; they were replacing pay that their physically-wrecked parents could no longer earn because industrial workers of the time were generally worn out at age 35. Children working in mines and mills were especially vulnerable to industrial accidents, and about everyone knew that the work was stunting their development. The general abolition of child labor was associated with later ages of school-leaving and better working conditions for adults.
Enforcement of laws against patent medicines and against child labor was comparatively easy and not at all disruptive to the overall economy.
...I have a thread on the business life-cycle, and the final stage of business life is often a rigid bureaucracy. Highly-bureaucratized organizations tend to be terribly inefficient, inflexible, and lacking ability to innovate. Except in banking and insurance, where bureaucracy is a means of ensuring that payments go to the right people, bureaucracy generally creates barriers to progress. To be sure, there are people who prefer shuffling papers to doing real work, and they might prefer working for a company on life support to working where they need get tangible results... but in general if you see a company in its bureaucratic phase and you are a young adult, then maybe your degree is more useful elsewhere.
The biggest office building in the world is the Pentagon. That should say plenty.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.