So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called "factory girls," young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious

So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called "factory girls," young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on. Source? My impression was that the point of the system was to make money, and that the girls were adequately treated ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls ). The main thing that sucked was super long hours. Many of the Lowell girls came from family farms that had too many mouths to feed. If a family produces more children than the farm can support, there is no escaping the hard life, no matter the political or economic system. It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. The corporation is a construct of contract law. There is no reason for it to be ratified by legislation. And contract law simply allows for scalable, voluntary transactions. And scalable voluntary transactions allow people to build large productive organizations that make stuff people want - cars, lightbulbs, transistors, etc. It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests. No argument here. But note that this is basically an immutable law of history. You'll have the same luck ranting against it as ranting against "death and taxes". That's why anarcho-anything is a dead end. If you write abaout political matters with a goal of influencing policy, you're best off coming up with ideas that are mutually beneficial to both the state and the public. It's basically court decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was. That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM). A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity. Once upon a time the idea of the school system was designed for obedience and passivity. But Supreme Court cases in the 1970's have made effective discipline in schools impossible. As a result, the education system circa 2009 is Lord of the Flies.