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Comment by dangerboysteve | Hacker News Reader

They can always smash looms.

The people who were smashing looms had their own looms. They were being undercut by automation and forced out of running their own one family business to working for a factory.

The factory could also cut costs by employing child labour to crawl among the machines fixing breakages at risk of their limbs.

That's capitalism for you. Are you really surprised people opposed this?

200 years later, we are unfathomably better off materially, because automation was slowed to destroy jobs.

Right... because working conditions in communist countries are so great, totally zero child slave labor going on in China. It's awesome when you're forced to work and still starve right?

This has nothing to do with communism, which hadn't even been invented at this point. It's about cottage industry vs capitalism.

It has nothing to do with capitalism either but you decided to insert it because your pink haired sociology professor and Berkley told you so.

Of course it does, it was literally when capitalism replaced cottage industry. I'm not an American, so I didn't go to Berkley and in fact don't have a degree because I went out and got a job.

Perhaps if you'd done the same you wouldn't have such a limited view of the world?

You got a job? Provided to you by capitalism? So you're working for the man? Dude, you're not being a very good socialist.

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