TIK History Video: Why British “Conservative Party” Likes High Taxes & Big Govt. Why Left-Right Labels Useless.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people worked on farms from dawn to dusk. They received low pay for backbreaking labour.  The average life expectancy of a British person was 35. In London between the years 1730 and 1749, 74.5% of children died before they reached the age of 5. That’s three-quarters of all children.  Imagine a world where that happened. Because that world was the reality for the vast majority of human history.

Centuries before the miracles of modern medicine, England was awash in parentless, sick and dying children. Farmers in places like France and Russia hibernated for 6 months of the year due to a lack of food. I don’t have evidence of that happening in England, but I do have evidence that one in ten families in England were below the “breadline” during the time King George was King of England. And people did starve to death in Britain during the pre-industrial and early industrial era.

But in the late 1700s, people did start to move out of the farms to the cities as a result of industrialization.  That isn’t to say there wasn’t poverty in the cities-of course there was.  But the industrial jobs were not as long houred as the agricultural jobs, and they were better paid as well.  If they weren’t why would people move from the idyllic farms to the squalid cities? It doesn’t make sense for them to choose the worst option. The reason they chose the terrible city jobs were because the farm jobs were even worse.  You were basically impoverished by working on the farms, while you had a better chance of survival working in the factories.  As a result, poverty decreased. From a child mortality rate of 74.5% during the 1740’s and 1750’s, it was down to 31.8% in the 1810 to 1829 period- a staggering decrease in child deaths for the first time in human history.

And just to note, Charles Dickens was writing during this era. Oliver Twist was published in the late 1830s. So at a time when industrialization had barely gotten going, and as urbanization was happening, Dickens was seeing all this poverty and writing about it.  And that’s fair enough – 31.8% of all children are still dying as late as 1829. But what is not said is that this was a vast improvement over what had been happening earlier. In the mid 1700s, it was 74.5%. So industrialization was making life better, not worse. But Charles Dickens like so many other early anti-poverty activists doesn’t know this. So he and others conclude that the poverty they see around them is caused by industrialization and the so-called free market, when in reality poverty was decreasing because of industrialization and the free market. I know he’s a fictional character, but Oliver Twist would have died had he been born in the 1700s. whereas he had a much better chance of survival because he was born in the 1800s.

Source of Historical Background For This Video:

Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the …