A nation of slaves

Again, not if you're willing to live in a typical 1930 house (with one bathroom for the whole family, a small kitchen, no family room, one bedroom for the parents, one bedroom for ALL the kids, no air conditioning, no garage, no laundry room).

The average price of a house is so much more today in large part because people want a lot more square footage.

> Health insurance.

Today's standards for health coverage are much higher than they were in 1930. Life expectancy for American men was 58 years back then. Blue Cross didn't exist. Jimmy Carter was the first US President born in a hospital (in 1924).

If you're willing to lower your standards dramatically, and accept medical treatment that's as sucky as it was in 1930, it's a lot cheaper than what we would today consider to be acceptable.

> Second cars (because women now need to work).

They don't, though. If you're willing to live the low quality of life that was prevalent in 1930, you can do it with a single-earner household.

In fact, why does your household even need one car? In 1930, most American households got by with zero.

To me that says that you are either drastically overestimating the potential misery due to fossil fuels or drastically underestimating the actual misery that was caused by slavery.

Subject, in this case, means subordinate. The newly-minted dual citizens (of federal and state citizenship) of 1868 and beyond are no longer "the people" that the government serves. They are the subordinates (slaves) of an authority no longer accountable to "The People", as there are technically none left post-1868.

If you think I'm exaggerating, I invite you to read SCOTUSblog sometime, and you'll eventually find someone (often a SCOTUS justice) mentioning how the first ten amendments of the bill of rights have now been "filtered" through the fourteenth, to see what stands and what doesn't. The only one yet to be filtered through the fourteenth is the third amendment (quartering troops). Thanks to DC V. Heller, the only one to escape unscathed is the second.

here's[1] a list of interesting cases directly affected by the 14th amendment.

[1] http://americanhistory.about.com/od/supremecourtcases/tp/Key...

Possibly, but I'm not sure we should take that at face value. There's another Planet Money story[0] about the efficacy of just giving money to people. If you accept that reducing poverty lets people become more productive by applying more of their available effort towards actions that do more than just sustain life, I think this at least puts enough question to that assertion to make it something that needs qualification.

One possible way to help is to use technology to reduce the need for large corporations, by making more and more things doable by smaller and smaller groups of people.

How does that account for the increased efficiencies gained from being large, e.g. bulk logistics? Walmart, split into 5,000 smaller individual stores, would likely not be able to match the prices of Walmart the mega-corporation, even if only due to bulk shipping and purchasing efficiencies (and leverage) gained by the single larger version.

Great discussion though, +1's all the way up the stack for you and mrow84.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-hap...