Category: History

A story about Native American tribes, an 1836 treaty, and the future of Lake Michigan

Source: Fishing on Lake Michigan in the Era of Climate Change – The Atlantic

Do note the 1890-1931 historical contexts, when support for eugenics was widespread across the political spectrum. The history portion of this and the quotes are interesting, but using this as an anti-minimum-wage argument in the present amounts to guilt-by-association.

The minimum wage has a dark, racist history. And the great irony is that its malicious intent is unwittingly being realized today.

Most of these writings would have been completely forgotten but for a seminal 2005 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Thomas C. Leonard.
…
“Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics,” Leonard explains, “believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the ‘unemployable.’”

One hundred years ago, legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes and the undesirables, and thereby to disincentivize their reproduction.

Source: The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Foundation for Economic Education by Jeffrey Tucker

Everyone complains about taxes, prices, and how expensive it is to live any more. I’m not going to go into taxes – that way lies madness. But I can tell you that living has never been cheaper. We live in a country awash in stuff – food, clothing, appliances, machines, cheap crap from China … compared to a world where everything is made by hand – we’re talking barely 200 years ago – everything is cheap and plentiful, and we are appallingly ungrateful.

Let’s talk clothing. When the Industrial Revolution began, it started with factories making cloth. Why? Because clothing used to be frighteningly expensive. Back in my teaching days I gave a standard lecture, which is about to follow, on the $3,500 shirt, or why peasants owned so little clothing.

7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt.

Source: SleuthSayers: The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics by Eve Fisher

An exploration of life aboard the International Space Station, and the surprising reasons the mission is still worthwhile

It’s a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don’t know the name of a single active astronaut—many don’t even know that Americans are up there. We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a stunning achievement, and it’s completely ignored.

Source: 5,200 Days in Space – The Atlantic

 

It is painfully slow progress in real time, but progress is progress nonetheless and a hundred years from now I’d bet few people will know our space progress ever felt slower.

Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated.

It started in the late 1600s in America, but like so many scams, it spiraled out of control until it had a life of its own.

Source: How White People Got Made – The Message – Medium by Quinn Norton