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It should also be painfully obvious that, during those times, the alternative — subsistence agriculture — was much worse, and people working in factories no longer starved. The industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended starvation and slavery, so when socialists of late 1800s or early 1900s talk of exploitation, that should raise an eyebrow.

Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.

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> the alternative — subsistence agriculture — was much worse, and people working in factories no longer starved.

It's not straightforward as that. In Europe, or at least in countries that are relevant "subsistence agriculture" had stopped being a significant thing centuries before the industrial revolution (outside of relatively rare periods of very bad weather).

By the 1800s there were generally too many people and not enough land (the real problem short term was that land being very unequally distributed and landhorders preferring to use it for less labor intense and more profitable purposes and significantly reducing the amount of "common land" available). Productivity was also increasing meaning there was a lower demand for labor. But that's the opposite of subsistence agriculture.

However it's not really that obvious that conditions for factory workers were meaningfully better than they would have been 50-100 years earlier until at least the mid 19th century or so when the labor market became more balanced and workers permitted to organize to some extent without the fear of extreme repression).

In most extreme cases like the Great Famine in Ireland the outcome was the opposite. There was enough food (or at least enough to significantly reduce the death toll) it's just that local people couldn't afford it and it was shipped off to feed the workers in the more industrialized parts of UK. That period probably marked the heyday of 'free market' and laissez-faire ideologies.

Just fyi the UN estimates 25,000 people die from hunger everyday and there are currently 50 million slaves around the world. Easy to forget but these things still exist.

Yes, in the parts of the world that are still not industrialized, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.

It's also easy to forget that during 19th century, 90%+ of the population suffered from hunger and malnutrition. Right now that's around 10%, but it's less than 2.5% in the highly industrialized countries.

IMO, the parts of the world still suffering from hunger could use more "corporate greed" and industrial exploitation.

They are dying of hunger because of corporate greed. Africa has many of the world’s most resource-rich areas, but they don’t realize the profits: Western corporations that extract the resources using local slave labor do.

So what's been stopping African companies/government from exploiting their own natural resources for all of these years?

"Corporate greed" is a fun slogan, but means nothing in reality. In the few areas where the government is exploiting its own natural resources (instead of outsiders), the working and living conditions are not inherently better. If it worked that way, all of the middle east and large areas of Africa wouldn't be so destitute.

Colonial and post-colonial intervention.

Control of the resources or territory wasn’t magically delivered to the people with equity. The colonial infrastructure of control was turned over to local friendly interests and their successors. (Through revolutions, coups, etc)

So what's stopping these countries today?

| post-colonial intervention

I'll ask again. What is stopping these countries today?

Handwavy, vague "post-colonial" whatever isn't a reason, it's an excuse.

The CIA prefers puppet states over independent states.

The people who control the resources control the armed forces or paramilitary forces.

Plus, if there’s a popular revolt, they are usually motivated by religious, ethnic or ideological factors. Status quo is the interest of the big powers. That tends to bring direct or advisory intervention by western military forces.

I’d suggest spending a few minutes googling, you’ll learn alot.

And as has been demonstrated, popular revolts tend to leave a power vacuum that gets filled by just another abusive regime.

You're trying to move goalposts (unsuccessfully) if you pretend that "today" is meaningful in geopolitics. If a country was a colony => invaded after independence + has a currency tied to and manipulated by the former power's currency + has internal powerbases built off the colonial satrap structure and corporate equivalents in oil etc ... it's the height of naivete to think it will "shake it off" a mere 20-30 years later, because some version of democracy was installed.

These are as a category unstable political situations and it is vanishingly few who manage to develop their way out of it. More common is descent into further chaos, with major powers standing by to ensure that it does not disrupt resource extraction.

That’s worldwide and vastly represented by countries that missed out on the industrial revolution or have corrupt and/or authoritarian governments, no?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...

Yes, in countries that are not free market countries.

20,500 Americans died of hunger in 2022.

Malnutrition is not the same thing.

Drug addicts and alcoholics often are malnourished - not because food is withheld from them, but because they are more interested in drugs and alcohol than food. The same goes for seriously ill people.

As far as alcohol goes, it's also because it's toxic as hell and actively stopping your body from absorbing what it needs from food.

Compare that to 1922 when population was much lower.

Extraordinary claims require a citation.

Edit: The parent appears to have committed the cardinal sin of believing CNN, which made this claim here[0], but cited a CDC report[1] does not support the assertion. I went looking for the underlying NCHS data, but couldn't find it.

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/health/nutritional-deficiency... [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf

A sure sign of a really bad argument is when the protagonist uses “not dying” as a justification for horrible actions.

Particularly entertaining is when apologists for the British Empire justify starvation events in Ireland and India. Particularly in Ireland when one of the peak famine years was a year of record exports of meat and wheat. The British government was of course, helpless to do much - they were concerned about the moral hazard of handing out food to dying people.

"Nobody starved to death in the 1800s or early 1900s" is an interesting take.

Yep for instance: 1932–1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

> Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.

The government has intricate voting protections for organized capital: oversight of the voting process with minority shareholder rights, stringent rules for the board and corporate governance, allowed cross-company collusion through mergers with very little checks, especially if the merger crosses industry lines. And they get extreme protection from liabilities for damages they cause.

For organized labor there is little in right-to-work states: "minority" voter rights that say anyone can defect from the majority, in many right to work states the majority can't even freely negotiate a contract that says new hires will be bound to the voting process (each new hire can defect), most of the voting rules there just make things almost impossible to organize as a whole rather than protecting the equivalent minority stakeholders, and collusion between unions isn't possible in the same way due to federal laws making secondary strikes illegal.

Organized capital gets a great structure to collaborate together that would be illegal if they were owners of separate businesses, workers get forcefully atomized even if they try and set up the organization through a freely negotiated contract (due to freely negotiated contracts not being able to set terms for new hires, through the outlawing of "Union Security Agreements" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_security_agreement). So things like dues don't have to be paid by new hires but the get the protections, then the collective action free-rider problem takes over and eventually dues for funding things like support during strikes dries up.

Imagine if new shareholders who bought some shares through an existing holder didn't have to be bound by the share-majority vote and could just sandbag mergers etc. by not agreeing to go through with it for their portion of the shares and they couldn't be forced to through the normal state collective action enforcement mechanisms that shareholders today all enjoy.

> The industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended starvation and slavery,

it was not the industrial revolution that ended either starvation or slavery

> Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.

Firstly, unions are not state-funded institutions, and secondly, it seems you don't understand how unions function.

Whether state-funded institutions and unions are more corrupt than private enterprise is an empirical question. Do you have empirical data to back this up?

Biden's $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/...

I've never heard of a private company that inept and corrupt.

You know the White House isn't personally building these charging stations, yes? The money is available and awarded to state entities that have to approve and bid out contracts, which come with their own set of local legislation that slow down the process. The Biden administration claims the process will advance faster now that states are enacting their own legislation and rules regarding charging stations. And you can guess that some states, operating on partisan lines, might not want to do anything that benefits the Biden administration--why care about their constituents' interest in the future when you can deny the opposition a win now?

You're describing inefficiency and corruption.

Also, Washington State is completely controlled by the Democrats - all three branches of the state government. Where are the charging stations? What about the other Democrat run states?

Do you know of any private company that moves that slowly?

I don't think it took years and $45 billion for Musk to install a national network of charging stations. Heck, even the local supermarket put in their own charging station.

Honeywell, for one, with whom I worked for eight years. It's incomprehensible, the wasted money I saw, easily reaching to billions over the same time frame. The difference is that you hear about large gov't spending initiatives, but not about those from Fortune 100s, whose incentives are to hide such inefficiencies and waste in their required reporting.

Enron. Boeing Starliner. Coke wasting $2B on a failed rollout of SAP. There are endless examples of huge piles of money pissed away in the private sector through inefficiency and incompetence, or outright theft.

However, we were discussing corruption, not inefficiency, and your example of Biden's EV program included no evidence of actual corruption. Can you think of a concrete example?

The pandemic relief funds come to mind.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/more-fraud-has-been-found-federal-c...

Googling for "corruption us government" provides endless examples. I remember reading about the disappearance of vast sums of government money sent to help the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Your example is fraud, not corruption, meaning parties external to the gov't are the guilty parties, not gov't employees. Corruption is carried out by insiders.

I'm not saying there's no corruption in the public sector. I'm saying it's not a given that it's greater than in the private sector, and asking for comparative data.

https://www.amazon.com/Corruption-Government-Causes-Conseque...

Does Rose-Ackerman argue that corruption is more prevalent in the public sector than the private sector? I've already said that I don't believe the public sector is free of corruption. Most of the hoops my employer jumps through with gov't bids has to do with anti-corruption processes.

You're talking about <1% of a massive piece of legislation. If you've never seen a sprawling corporate project where the worst 1% of the budget turned out poorly you've led a much more charmed professional life than I have.

The Biden Admin didn't spend the money, it made the money __available to the States__ to fund proposals and contracts which the __States__ are responsible to manage.

The money is __allocated__, but it's not __spent__ until the States finish viable proposals, and with a completely new technology, that takes the States time.

> “State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," ... “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.” ... the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved.

> 17 states have not yet issued proposals

If anyone's at fault, it's the States.

The state government is government, too.

i'm guessing this comment won't be popular, but i defy any downvoter to explain what part of it is wrong, much less downvote worthy. are we really gonna stick our heads in the sand and pretend like unions aren't (1) famous hotbeds of corruption (not the only one in society by any stretch, but let's be honest) (2) artificial scarcity of labor supply-- guess who that benefits? those specific workers... at the expense of literally everyone else in society! is that ok? probably / it depends / who knows. but it is true. why do you think going to the doctor is so expensive? well, lots of reason, but artificial scarcity is a huuuge one (3) the source of all kinds of asinine rules and regulations that are actually really annoying to deal with if you're trying to do stuff. like having to pay a "union guy" if you want to have any sort of nontrivially elaborate display at a convention, etc.

i get why people have this kneejerk reaction about "union good" because it is good... for the union members... and having a middle class in society is definitely good. aesthetically, at least-- i couldn't really tell you why from first principles, but it does just seem better, intuitively. but just because we all hate "capitalism" now doesn't mean we should forget that shit being so cheap on amazon is actually a good we all can enjoy, including guild-i-mean-union members!

it's sad that i feel the need to point out that i am pro-labor (whatever that means), pro-the-little-guys, fuck billionaires, etc. because i dared say anything negative about a protected class... that's just a fact of life in the 2020s i guess... i just think this stuff is all WAY more subtle than people give it credit for, and that is part of what gives bad actors carte blanche to... act badly... and that is something everyone should be against, no matter how red their favorite book is.

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