History: The Year is 1830

I've uploaded year 1830 to the TSP Wiki...

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Here are some one liners...


Stop the Gin Mills! Drink More Beer! -- The temperance movement is starting, so beer is made easier to get than gin. That will not satisfy them, though.

The Thresher Riots Are in Full Swing -- The Luddites are destroying the threshing machines. This will lead to increases in the Dole. It's a trap.

In Other News -- The sewing machine, paraffin, and the Book of Mormon.

Stop the Gin Mills! Drink More Beer!

The temperance movement is just getting started and its followers have two strategies: encouraging self-control and prohibiting alcohol by law. The Beer Act of 1830 is a way to put off the prohibitionists. The "Gin Palaces" are inviting places, to be sure, but they sell hard liquor and the licensing board does not encourage alternatives. (Read as, the gin joints don't want competition from the beer joints, so they manipulate the licensing boards so that only hard liquor is licensed for production. Got it? OK.) The temperance movement is putting on the pressure, so the British Parliament allows the easy licensing of public beer and ale houses and they pass the Beer Act allowing for the personal production and sale of beer and ale. The hope is that with a cheap alternative to the devil's rum the people will moderate their drinking. Remember that in London, nothing will kill you quicker than drinking untreated water from the Thames. So, for now... all things in moderation. In five short years the proliferation of beer joints will be seen as "the highway to drunkenness." (A gateway drug, so to speak.) Then the temperance movement will shift into high gear. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}

My Take by Alex Shrugged
In the modern day there is still a distinction made between licensing for the sale of beer and wine and the licensing for the sale of distilled alcohol. Every town has its reasons. Some of them are moral. Others are practical, such as keeping bars out of sight of kids. As a teenager I was cutting through the parking lot of a local bar when I noticed a car that looked suspiciously like our family sedan. After I mentioned it to my mother, I never saw it there again. (Hmmmmm. I wonder.) There is also the lingering fear of organized crime. One of my old friends was a rum runner during Prohibition. A lot of his buddies ended up under the car rather than driving it. After he got out of prison, he mended his ways and finally received a pardon from the governor. You never saw a prouder man. I miss him. But the rule is that if you are going to produce distilled alcohol you must give Uncle Sam his cut or he will be very angry. I do not pretend to know all the federal rules and there are local rules as well. Use your head. Do the right thing and remember... the "revenuers" have no sense of humor whatsoever. ^[6]

The Thresher Riots Are in Full Swing

It is summertime near East Kent. It is "the last straw", for the workers. The mobile-powered threshing machine is putting the Swing-threshers out of work. Threshing was once a manual skill. One must remove the head of the grain stalk without destroying it. Threshing machines have been used here-and-there, but with the steam engine powering them, a threshing machine can go anywhere. The Swing-threshers see their doom, so they break the machines. Thousands of riots break out across England. England is used to a certain amount of violence and intimidation between the workers and the landowners. It is an old dance, but the tune has changed. Threats, fire and terror continue into the next year. After the Swing Trials, nineteen men will "swing" from the gallows, but this marks a turning point. The Poor Laws will be changed. The Dole will be increased. Workhouses for the poor will increase but the number of poor will not decrease. It's a trap. ^{[7] [8] [9]}

My Take by Alex Shrugged
In the USA, Poor Farms were eventually replaced by Social Security benefits. Migrant workers received unemployment pay. Initially, these programs worked, but the 13 million poor in 1960 that we tried to lift out of poverty by spending trillions of dollars, still numbered 13 million by 1980. We hadn't helped. Not even a little. ^{[10] [11]}

The most compelling explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we--meaning the not-poor and un-disadvantaged--had changed the rules of their world. Not of our world, just of theirs. The first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses--to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

-- Charles Murray, Losing Ground, p. 9. ^[12]

In Other News

• The first sewing machine is patented in France. The factory burns to the ground as workers fear that their jobs are going bye-bye. ^{[13] [14] [15] [16] [17]}

• A German industrialist discovers paraffin. He was experimenting with coal distillates. An efficient means to extract paraffin wax won't be developed until the 1850s. ^{[18] [19] [20]}

• The Book of Mormon is published. This is also the year that the first Latterday Saints church is established although the movement will not officially receive that name until 1838. ^{[18] [21] [22]}

This Year in Wikipedia

Year 1830, Wikipedia.