How far humanity has come! In particular, the very meaning of work has been redefined, vastly for the better, and only very recently in human history.
The Original Serfdom
For most of history, work was drudgery: backbreaking, unchanging, inescapable. Nearly all were consigned to hard agricultural labor: to eking out a subsistence from the stingy soil. This was a precarious existence: always only a couple bad harvests away from death by malnutrition.
Work was backbreaking because technological progress was extremely slow, which meant scant few labor-saving devices and techniques. This lack of innovation is what made the work unchanging and inescapable. Providing for the most basic needs of life demanded nearly all human effort. People could not afford to engage in other kinds of work for less urgent ends, lest they succumb to hunger and the elements.
This stagnation was the result of deficient customs of morality and justice. Technological advancement requires saving and investment: the turning of resources away from consumption and toward production. But significant saving was made impractical by the insecurity of property rights. Any conspicuous “surplus” was likely to be seized, either by egalitarian neighbors or elite potentates: these being the archaic “Left” and “Right” wings of humanity that have forever preyed on and weighed down human potential.
Even if an individual could accumulate savings, it was generally impossible to put it to use because of restrictions on labor. Ancient slaves and medieval serfs were bound to their masters and lords. Such bondsmen were not free to be recruited by capital-owning entrepreneurs, nor to become entrepreneurs themselves.
For millennia, humanity was held back and hungry for want of liberty and property.
Read the full article by Dan Sanchez at the Foundation for Economic Education.
