Tag Archives: free market

Today we discuss the ideology of market egalitarianism and versions of libertarianism from the Levellers in 17th century England through Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and on to Lincoln’s political argument to poor whites that wage labor was slave labor and a man should instead stand on his own two feet on his own plot …

The “father of the modern welfare state” is said to be Lester Frank Ward, an American sociologist who published his major work in the midst of what is called the Gilded Age, 1870-1900 (which incidentally also dovetails with the end of Reconstruction and the inception of Jim Crow Laws). He believed “A sociology which intelligently and scientifically directed the social …