Ordinary Abundance
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
t’s eight o’clock. The apartment is quiet, aside from the music playing softly over the speaker. It’s a playlist your friend made for you years ago. You send them a text to check in, then pick up a book, flick on the lamp, and settle into the chair to read.
Any song, at home
If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.
Edward Bellamy, 1888 — From Looking Backward, his utopian novel set in the year 2000. Before recordings, listening to music meant having instruments or performers nearby, and favorite songs could go unheard for years at a time.
Light without fire
The people, almost with bated breath, stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural. The strange, weird light, exceeded in power only by the sun, yet mild as moonlight, rendered the Court House square as light as midday.
A witness at Wabash, Indiana, 1880 — The night Wabash, Indiana became one of the first cities lit entirely by electric light. Candles, oil lamps, and gas jets gave relatively feeble light, and were all smoky open fires inside the home.
A museum on the wall
A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls.
André Malraux, 1947 — Le Musée imaginaire, later translated as Museum Without Walls. Before reliable reproduction, most people saw major artworks only by visiting churches, collections, or museums.
Memories kept
The very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! ... I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist's work ever produced.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1843 — On first seeing a daguerreotype, in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford. Preserving a likeness used to require a painted portrait; many families had no accurate image of relatives who died.
Reading after the eyes fail
It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles ... one of the best and most necessary in the world. I myself saw the man who discovered it, and I talked with him.
Friar Giordano da Pisa, 1306 — A sermon at Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Age-related vision loss was common, and before spectacles it could end reading and other close work.
Distant messaging
Of all the marvellous achievements of modern science, the Electric Telegraph is transcendently the greatest and most serviceable to mankind. It is a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.
Briggs & Maverick, 1858 — The Story of the Telegraph. For most of history, messages traveled only as fast as the person who carried them. Receiving a reply from far away could take weeks or months.
Books unchained
A great good, and almost a divine benefit to the world.
Jakob Wimpfeling, 1505 — The German humanist, on the new art of printing. A hand-copied book was valuable enough that libraries chained theirs to the reading desks.
The kitchen
It’s nine. A chapter ends, and you stretch and wander into the kitchen. You’re not exactly sure what you want, so you aimlessly rifle through your fruit bowl, open and close the door to the fridge, and settle on a cup of tea. You lean against the counter and let your mind wander as the water comes to a boil.
Clean water on tap
Water! Water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.
Philip Hone, 1842 — On the arrival of Croton water in New York City, in his diary. Manhattan’s wells shared soil with its privies and burial grounds; the cholera epidemic ten years earlier had killed 3,515 New Yorkers.
Fruit from afar
Like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish.
Charles Lamb, 1822 — On the rapture of the pineapple. In eighteenth-century Britain, a pineapple was costly enough that hostesses sometimes rented one for the evening rather than eat it.
Cold kept indoors
The first transport of ice from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges is an event of no mean importance ... the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through their adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the name of other benefactors of mankind.
The Calcutta Courier, 1837 — On the arrival of New England pond-ice in tropical India. Without cold storage, perishable food like dairy and meat spoiled within a day, and most foods could not be kept or eaten out of season.
Eden in jars
It is said that these things come from the earthly paradise; for the wind blows down the trees in paradise, just as the wind blows down the dry wood in the forests of our own land.
Jean de Joinville, c. 1309 — On merchants who netted ginger, cinnamon and rhubarb from the Nile. In medieval price lists, a pound of ginger sold for the price of a sheep; a pound of saffron, the price of a horse.
The back room
At ten, the night starts to wind down. You wash your face, then wash down a pill with a glass of water. As you brush your teeth, you make a mental note of the last few chores you need to cross off the list tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.
Smallpox made historical
You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest. ... Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed, and by you has been extirpated.
Thomas Jefferson, 1806 — In a letter celebrating Edward Jenner’s vaccine, sent to Jenner’s nephew. Smallpox killed about three of every ten people it infected, and in Jenner’s century it killed an estimated four hundred thousand Europeans a year.
Pain, interrupted
Before whom, in all time, surgery was agony; by whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; since whom, science has controlled pain.
Epitaph of W. T. G. Morton, 1871 — Morton first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia. Before anesthesia, operations were performed with the patient conscious, and the primary means of managing pain were speed, alcohol, and opium.
The end of the outhouse
It just felt like I was the wealthiest person in the world. It felt great not to have to go outside to go to the restroom.
Patty Doak, 2003 — Recalling her family's first indoor bathroom, rural Iowa. Well into the twentieth century, most rural American homes had no indoor bathroom, and every gallon of water for cooking, washing, and bathing was carried in by hand.
Freedom on two wheels
I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.
Susan B. Anthony, 1896 — Interviewed by Nellie Bly for the New York World. The safety bicycle opened up new possibilities for independent travel, especially for women under restrictive social rules.
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Thank you Capitalism. Let's hope the socialists don't take away our prosperity with their ignorance and jealousy.
But the listed examples are not products of Capitalism. In fact some of these examples -- like municipal clean water systems, public sanitation, public transportation, vaccinations, and ice houses -- are public works which are outside the influences of Capitalism.
Free Enterprise delivers abundance through innovation, competition, and an open marketplace. Fair competition in an open marketplace provides opportunities that reward innovation. That is what Adam Smith described in his "Wealth of Nations".
Capitalism seeks to exploit abundance. Capitalism is about leveraging property rights to minimize marketplace competition, creating toll booths to collect rents and fees, and rewards the accumulation of assets. The most fundamental description of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. The barriers to opportunity created by concentrated capital is what prompted Karl Marx to create Socialism.
As we've seen over the last 40 years, Free Enterprise and Capitalism are not compatible. Private central planning doesn't work any better than public central planning. Both Capitalism and Socialism are only a scramble for money. The concentration of money in either private hands or public hands cannot deliver abundance or prosperity.