Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.
replyWhat it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.
Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.
It took a literal civil war, which you don't read about in history books so much because it's not beneficial for the owners of those publishing houses to have more people hear about it. Lots of people died on both sides.
replyLast time inequality cooked up it took a lifetime to go back down. It did so very painfully through capital incineration on a monumental scale: a great depression, where the incineration was metaphorical, and two world wars, where it was very literal. In both cases it was economical and in both cases it fixed the problem but at enormous cost. We should aim to do better.
replyPlus all the union violence. The ones where owners used guns to break strikes so striking workers also started bringing guns and using them. I don't think we want that, do you?
replyEasy to say it all worked out fine when you aren't one of the people who was displaced. They might feel differently.
replyIt may have worked out fine for humanity as a whole, but it ignores the suffering of a lot of people.