After the War of 1812, Yankee Ingenuity began to become a byword. American technology began to destroy skills and careers that had existed since the Egyptians and Babylonians.
In the following decades, railroads and steamships eliminated the need for animal-drawn wagons, carts, and stagecoaches. Most of the old jobs went away. There were few craftsmen left making reins, horseshoes, yokes, horse collars, and canal boats. Long distance transport no longer used such things.
Hundreds of “little inventions” accompanied and improved the steam engine transformed life in the Caucasian nations. While the rest of the world remained stagnant, still in the early Iron Age, sparks of genius in the West soon lit up the earth.
Massive unemployment was occurring. New jobs were created. Social disruption prompted people like Horace “Go West, young man.” Greeley to come up with theories of political organization that would provide some level of protection. Many “concerned citizens” were involved in thinking deep thoughts on the subject.
Greeley thought the answer was to reorganize the nation into economic units based on townships. Each township would provide the sustenance necessary for its people, with communal living that somehow protected family structure.
Nothing came of it. Nothing ever comes from such half-baked activities. The only communal groups in history that have lasted are those whose members freely choose to embrace obedience, celibacy, and poverty.
During the time that “Yankee Ingenuity” became a popular description of the farming, manufacturing, and transportation advances taking place in America, people simply learned to live with ongoing economic dislocation. The same changes in today’s established concerns are taking place. Those protected by government are always able to delay, but not stop, the changes.
Nations whose people embrace change quickly come up with newer, deadlier, weapons of war that provide threats that make technical progress less painful than death or slavery. Bureaucrats like to be protected from modern weapons while keeping similar advancements in technology from threatening their own jobs.
Some are so concerned about their earthly employment that they will stop loving their neighbors in order to have money taken from them. The expenses required to provide salaries, benefits, and pensions to those who make no meaningful contribution delay, and even destroy, the new jobs that would ordinarily be replacing those made extinct by the latest technology.
Some are less concerned. Focusing on where our souls will spend eternity keeps us from worrying about things beyond our ability to control.
