Karl Popper: The Open Society and its Enemies.

What Mises, Friedman and other liberal free market advocates will rightly respond is that these children would otherwise been in worse situations or not have been born at all because their parents wouldn’t have had the ability to even nurture them to their age. However it is not arguable that a truly unrestrained free market system at its very inception in the 1800s created a system of rampant and vile exploitation of the workers. The market eventually rights itself, as Mises noted in Human Action, and working conditions eventually do improve as the standard of living enriches through the very capitalistic “exploitations” themselves. But those caught in the initial toils would never be able to recover anything for their sacrifices. Their toils have been put into the system and they will never taste the rewards of their cruel labor. Such is the cruelties of life. It is life that show disdain for humanity and equality. Marx is right to say that a system is fundamentally above the individual, but the systemic exploitation is not from the bourgeoise but rather the conditions of life. The true exploiter of human being and the source of all miseries is life itself. Life is not beautiful. Life is miserable. It is the fact that all inputs into the system must be guaranteed and “prepaid” and all outputs from life is on purely speculative grounds that causes many issues of the “class struggle”. The bourgeoisie advanced to where they were due to the risks they took and the failures that others similar to them suffered. They exploited the proletarian because of self preservation, and the old adage that if they don’t do it, somebody else will. The reason the bourgeoisies claims ownership to all of their returns is because they have equally “paid” to life just as the proletarians have, only they have paid partly in risks rather than pure work.  In their minds, they have also paid much toils, and deserves much spoils. Therefore the ultimate source of this cruel system is very much life itself. The system is not a conspiracy created to benefit any single individual or groups. The system is impartially cruel to all, nobody is exploiting others without being exploited themselves. It might have been the greatest philosophical insight when Sophocles uttered that maybe the greatest boon is to have never been born at all.