Megan J. McArdle

So they decided to destroy the machines.

Honestly, I have some sympathy.

In fact, every time one of these companies issues a new model, I get more sympathetic.

We libertarians like to talk about the glories of freedom and progress, and they are glorious.

But they are not free.

Sometimes people get hurt, often lots of people.

The printing press democratized knowledge and also witch burnings and wars of religion.

The Industrial Revolution raised living standards and offset them with grim factory jobs, squalid urban living conditions and choking pollution.

Now, modern governments can allay many of those costs, but they can't give people back the life they had.

And we have an obligation to count those costs.

I mean, if only because no one was ever persuaded by being told, your fears are stupid.

So here's why, even after a full accounting, I think we should be willing to bear those costs and let the future unfold.

because we're all the beneficiaries of previous decisions to prioritize future growth over protecting the present.

Very few people in this room have ever worried about how they were going to obtain food or shelter or heat or how they were going to bury a child who died of diarrhea before its first birthday.

Those worries are the normal condition of humanity.

We escaped them only through massive chronological luck.

That is a precious and totally unearned inheritance, and I think we have an obligation to pay that forward and leave an even bigger legacy for our descendants.

To do otherwise, it's a kind of theft.

It's stealing from the future.

Picture what it would have looked like if the Luddites actually had managed to halt progress in its tracks.