The Meaning of Words

Atrios makes an excellent point, and I don't just mean Bruce Springsteen for Senator:

I'm roughly a "free trader" in the sense that removing the blunt protectionism of tariffs and quotas is broadly a worthy if not especially important goal at this point in time, though I'm certainly not in support of a lot of the things which have been thrown under the umbrella of "free trade." But the important point that needs to be made clearly is that even the simple textbook free trade agreement which removes tariffs and quotas is going to negatively impact a significant number of people. Those people are not naive Luddites to be dismissed by the Moustache of Understanding but people who rationally understand that free trade policies are going to hurt their incomes.

In the modern world, the word "Luddite" has come to mean someone who irrationally opposes new technology for the sake of it. But this is a fiction, a straw man set up by the original victims of rationally angry crowds.

What we call Luddism today was never confined to textile mills or anything like that. Rather, the Luddites of the early 19th century were the inheritors of a long line of rural and working-class protesters of economic inequality. Across Europe, when bread prices got too high, there would inevitable follow a bread riot. But here's the thing - bakers were almost never killed, and they were usually paid for the bread that was taken (albeit unwillingly) from their shops. Crowds would gather, demand a fair price for the bread, take the bread and leave the stated fair price.

The image of angry, ignorant mobs burning down textile mills is largely (though not entirely) fictional. These were people who wanted to work, wanted to be compensated fairly, and saw the new textile mills as a danger to their lives, not just their livelihood. Even today in modern societies, the best statistical indicator of your life expectancy is your income. This was even more true a few centuries ago. Poverty = death.

That fiction of the ignorant mobs was largely created after the fact to justify incredibly harsh punitive measures taken against english workers. Using the word Luddite today as a perjorative has a pretty dark history that we don't usually know. The reality is that most people today are closer to being Luddites than anything else.