Every socialist freshman and tenured academic Marxist still recites the same bedtime story: Once upon a time, before the dark Satanic mills rose, happy peasants danced around maypoles, worked four hours a day in sun-dappled fields, then went home to roast goose and robust children raised on fresh air. Then capitalism slouched in like a top-hatted demon, herded everyone into hellish factories, paid them in scraps, and poisoned the rivers for profit.
It's a beautiful fairy tale. It's also almost perfectly inverted from reality.
As Roger Kimball reminds us in his November 23, 2025 masterpiece "The Evils of Capitalism," (link below), the actual historical record is devastating to the myth. The standard anti-capitalist indictment, fed to generations on a diet of Dickens, Engels, and Bertrand Russell, is built on nostalgia for a pre-industrial Eden that never existed and statistical malpractice that would embarrass an undergraduate.
Life before the factory system was not "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" because capitalism came along and made it so. It was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short because that's what life had always been for 99% of humanity since we crawled out of caves. The miracle is not that early factories were gritty and dangerous; the miracle is that for the first time in recorded history, ordinary people began escaping that ancestral misery at scale.
Real wages in Britain began rising sharply after 1820, exactly when the factory system took off. Life expectancy jumped. Child mortality plummeted. By the 1840s, while Engels was still weeping over his imaginary lost Arcadia, British workers were already eating more meat, sugar, and tea than any working population in human history. Cheap cotton dresses, once a luxury for aristocrats, were suddenly within reach of factory girls. Literacy exploded because parents finally had spare shillings for schooling instead of needing their eight-year-old in the fields from dawn to dusk.
Yes, factory towns were ugly. Yes, 14-hour days were brutal. Yes, some mill owners were greedy monsters as Dickens showed. But compare that to the pre-capitalist baseline: back-breaking subsistence agriculture, regular famine, 50% of children dead before age five, average life expectancy in the low 30s, and winters spent burning furniture because you couldn't afford firewood. Rural life wasn't romantic; it was a slow-motion catastrophe occasionally interrupted by plague.
The critics cherry-pick the absolute worst factories (often the outliers) and ignore the direction of travel. They quote the Sadler Committee report the way climate activists quote single weather events, ignoring that it was later exposed as a partisan hatchet job packed with coached testimony and outright fabrications. Even Friedrich Engels, high priest of the anti-factory cult, quietly dropped most of those horror stories in later editions of his own book when the data stopped cooperating. And Engels had factories of his own.
Here's the part that drives the modern Left into apoplectic rage: the Industrial Revolution wasn't a moral tragedy we had to endure to get iPhones. It was the greatest anti-poverty program ever spontaneously generated by human action. Between 1800 and 1900, global average real income per person roughly tripled. Since 1900 it has increased another tenfold, and almost all of that happened in countries that adopted markets, trade, and (yes) the profit motive.
The factory didn't immiserate the worker; it liberated him from the tyranny of soil and season. For the first time, a Lancashire mill girl had cash wages, geographic mobility, and the ability to tell a feudal landlord where to go. That's not oppression; that's the birth of freedom.
Every time some trust-fund socialist on X wails that "capitalism is theft," remember: the device they typed it on was produced by a supply chain that has lifted more human beings out of abject poverty in the last forty years than every government program in history combined. Extreme poverty worldwide has fallen from 42% in 1980 to under 9% today, almost entirely thanks to market reforms in China and India, not UN handouts.
Capitalism's critics always demand you judge it against utopia. Judge it instead against the realistic alternatives, feudalism, socialism, mercantilism.
Were there dark chapters? Of course. Child labour laws were necessary (and guess what — wealthy capitalist societies passed them first). Pollution controls were needed (again, capitalist societies invented them). But these were corrections made possible only because capitalism first generated the surplus wealth and moral breathing room to afford them.
The next time someone lectures you about the "evils of early capitalism," ask them a simple question: Would you rather your children grew up in 1750 rural England or 1850 Manchester? Nine out of ten will dodge the question because they know the honest answer destroys their entire worldview.
Capitalism didn't create human suffering. It inherited a world drowning in it, and then, messy and brutal and imperfect, started bailing like hell with a thimble. Today we're bailing with buckets, and the waterline is finally dropping. And there is room for massive improvements, such as Douglas social credit to deal with the existing problem of the deficiency of purchasing power, but the Left does not touch this question.