Friends, if you suffer from literary-induced claustrophobia, stop reading now!
Alright, here’s the story:
A Christian friend came up from Wales for the weekend and I took him to an outdoor museum called Beamish. It’s a real head trip — one minute you’re sitting in a gloomy house from the 1700s because the sociopaths who controlled Britain once taxed candles, then you’re on a 1920s high street, then one streetcar later you’re in a post-war 1950s fish n’ chips shop.
It’s fabulous:
Among other things, you can visit a 1900s village that has miner’s cottages, a steam train, a Methodist chapel, and an actual drift mine.
My friend and I donned hard hats and took the plunge.
The mine runs two miles in length, and because the roof is only about four feet high, you have to bend the whole way.
In 1824, the miner’s shift didn’t start until they’d reached the job site, meaning they didn’t get paid to walk the back-breaking half-hour in either direction.
The miners had to (over)pay their overlords for everything:
They had to pay for their helmets
They had to pay for their boots and mining clothes
They had to pay for their pick axes
They even had to (over)pay to get their pick axes sharpened because their overlords monopolized all the machinery.
Miners started at age fourteen. A quarter were dead before forty.
Usually horrifically, from explosions, fires, gas inhalation, or the black lung.
Miners were expected to pick out eight carloads of coal per day.
Each carload weighed 800 pounds.
If they were underweight even by an ounce, they got docked 50% of their pay for that carload.
(Of course, if they mined more than 800 pounds— and they always did so to be safe — they didn’t get extra.)
If the carload was more than 10% rock, they got docked another 50% of their pay for that carload.
In other words, a miner could dig out 719 pounds of coal by hand and not get paid a single cent.
Working with a four-foot ceiling height was the dream.
Most miners tasked with mining new seams worked for months on end in nightmarish spaces of just eighteen inches.
And let’s not forget the bottom six of those inches were often full of freezing cold spring water.
All this work was done in the near pitch black… all by the light of a single low lamp flame.
(If they didn’t keep the flame low, they’d run out of oil before the end of their shift and have to find their way back in the dark.)
That was their hellish week — six days in the dark cold belly of the earth doing bone-rattling physical work.
Now to spend their meager pay.
Because the mines were in the middle of nowhere, the miners had to rent hovels from their bosses.
Naturally, the rents were obscene.
Food and clothing were also only available at sky-high prices from the boss-owned local store.
In other words: These slaves paid for their own slavery.
Sadly, many of these coal barons called themselves Christians.
But it raises the question…
Why the heck would anyone choose to work in a coal mine?
And the answer is sadly:
If they didn’t, they would starve to death.
See, all the land was monopolized by an inbred family of aristocrats headed by a crime family called the House of Windsor.
If you were born into the bottom 99%, you couldn’t just travel the land, board a ship, sail to the Americas, kill a few natives, and farm their land.
You didn’t have the money for the journey to the coast.
You didn’t have the money to board a ship.
You didn’t have the money to provision yourself for the journey.
You would start to death before you even made it to the seafront.
And the land-lorders knew this.
Their monopolization of land was the very thing that enabled them to enlist a “willing” workforce to volunteer as slaves to rape the Earth in order to fire the engines of industry, pollute the planet on a scale previously unimaginable, and create colossal fortunes for the rich robber barons in London.
So here’s my question for you:
If someone “chooses” to work in a coal mine if the literal only other option is death… is that slavery?
[The answer, in case you’re confused or you’re a hyper-right libertarian who’s bludgeoned your conscience to death, is “Yes, it is a form of slavery called feudalism.”]
A nation where citizens are forced by economics into certain behaviors is, by definition, not free.
In case I’m not being crystal clear:
Nations without land rights for all are slave states.
The Bible got this one right — if all the land is monopolized and people have to rent their bodies in order to access the means of survival, it means they live in a slave state.
If all the land is monopolized, then the only way to access resources is to rent your body for exploitation in an office or factory, and then use your suppressed pay to overpay other land-lorders for shelter.
It’s sickening.
History will be appalled at the behavior of today’s rich.
2024 is 1824 all over again.
We live in a feudal society, whether you like it or not.
The world needs land rights for all
No able-bodied person should get a free ride, but they should absolutely get free access to the resources required to survive and thrive.
All land was once free and common, and from the moment people monopolized land, those nations became not-free.
The Biblical model is the allot portions of land to every family.
(The Bible even outlines sustainability stipulations for said allotments.)
Ironically, nearly every nation on earth still has enough government-owned public land to give every citizen 2 acres — including America and way-overpopulated-China.
Alternately, we could get rid of all other forms of taxation and just tax land monopolization, using the proceeds to deliver UBI to everyone who’s been shut out of free access to once-commons resources.
This is justice.
This is freedom.
This is righteousness.
This is sound economics.
These concepts are so utterly foreign to most people (including church-goers) that they feel repulsive.
But… fish don’t realize they live in water.
People in the West don’t realize they live in an economic system that is cancerous to its bones.
Christians don’t realize we live in Mammonomics, not Christonomics.
Can we wake up the sleeping church, or are pew-warmers happy to let this revived feudal economic system devour their children like the coal pits of the past?