You might have expected the World-War-II-was-necessary crowd to have piped up in the comments section of “World War II: The Nadir of the Old Right.” Instead, we find the cliché assertion in “Mises in America” of all places:

Was the outcome of the war known before the United States entered it? After all, Hitler most likely would have conquered Europe without the United States’ intervention.

That’s certainly what we’ve all been taught all our lives: American entry into WWII saved Europe from fascism. But I’ve never heard any argument for this claim, only the claim itself, repeated endlessly.

Is it true?

[Read the rest »]

(See also, 14th-century price fixing, part I: “branded with an F”.)

14th-century price fixing, part II:

Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought them in constant conflict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still held grimly to pre-plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand. Because the provisions against leaving one employment for a better were impossible to enforce, penalties were constantly augmented. Violators who could not be caught were declared outlaws — and made lawless by the verdict. Free peasants took to the nomadic life, leaving a fixed abode so that the statute could not be executed against them, roaming from place to place, seeking day work for good wages where they could get it, resorting to thievery or beggary where they could not, breaking the social bond, living in the classic enmity to authority of Robin Hood for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

"EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT!"

– Hagbard Celine, “Celine’s Laws”

It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how "out of great malice" laborers and servants leave at will, and how "if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together."

To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to Langland, when their fortunes prospered. "They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon," but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish, "hot-and-hot for the chill of their maw." Joining with the villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for "mutual defense," and "gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand." A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 14: "England’s Turmoil," p. 286f.

(See also, 14th-century price fixing, part I: “branded with an F”.)

A history of price fixing would have to begin in antiquity, but I didn’t encounter quotable passages in any of my ancient history books. I’m definitely encountering some in the Middle Ages. This is from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century:

When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague’s greatest social disruption — a concerted demand for higher wages. Peasants as well as artisans, craftsmen, clerks, and priests discovered the lever of their own scarcity. Within a year after the plague had passed through northern France, the textile workers of St. Omer near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases. In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.

The response of rulers was instant repression. In the effort to hold wages at pre-plague levels, the English issued an ordinance in 1349 requiring everyone to work for the same pay as in 1347. Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statue of Laborers. It denounced not only laborers who demanded higher wages but particularly those who chose "rather to beg in idleness than to earn their bread in labor." Idleness of the worker was a crime against society, for the medieval system rested on his obligation to work. The Statute of Laborers was not simply a reactionary dream but an effort to maintain the system. It provided that every able-bodied person under sixty with no means of subsistence must work for whoever required him, that no alms could be given to anyone who claimed him. Down to the 20th century this statue was to serve as the basis for "conspiracy" laws against labor in the long struggle to prevent unionization.

A more realistic French statute of 1351 applying only to the region of Paris, allowed a rise in wages not to exceed one third of the former level. Prices were fixed and profits of middlemen were regulated. To increase production, guilds were required to loosen their restrictions on the number of apprentices and shorten the period before they could become masters. In both countries, as shown by repeated renewals of the laws with rising penalties, the statutes were unenforceable. Violations cited by the English Parliament in 1352 show workers demanding and employers paying wages at double and treble the pre-plague rate. Stocks were ordered set up in every town for punishment of offenders. In 1360 imprisonment replaced fines as the penalty and fugitive laborers were declared outlaws. If caught, they were to be branded on the forehead with F for "fugitive" (or possibly for "falsity"). New laws were enacted twice more in the 1360s, breeding the resistance that was to come to a head in the great outbreak of 1381.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 5
“This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
(p. 120f)