"Man vs. Machine": the Swing Riots (1830)

There were three notable incidents of machine breaking in England during the period of industrialization: the 1779 Lancashire riots, the 1811 Luddite uprising and the Captain Swing riots of 1830. Ironically, William Cobbett, who had published his Letter to the Luddites in 1816, was prosecuted in the wake of the Swing Riots for seditious libel for articles he wrote defending the rural labourers. In 1831, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published a popular tract by Charles Knight titled The Working-Man's Companion. The Results of Machinery, Namely Cheap Production and Increased Employment, Exhibited: Being an Address to the Working-Men of the United Kingdom, which presented an amiable and didactic rebuttal to the error presumably committed by those who attacked machines to protest their destitution:

There is no truth so clear, that as the productions of industry multiply, the means of acquiring those productions multiply also. The productions which are created by one producer, furnish the means of purchasing the productions created by another producer; and, in consequence of this double production, the necessities of both the one and the other are better supplied. The multiplication of produce multiplies the consumers of produce.

The consequence of this law is supposedly that there is no such thing as a limit to the wants of consumers or to the means available to consumers to satisfy their wants. Thus the amount of work to be done is also unlimited and, in fact, expands as a consequence of machinery. The introduction of machinery may indeed displace workers in one particular occupation but will soon open new opportunities. With regard to that temporary displacement, however, the author had a bit of advice uncharacteristic of latter-day fallacy claims: withdraw your labor from the market!

There is a glut of laborers in the market. If you continue in the market of labor during this glut, your wages must fall. What is the remedy? To go out of the market… When there is too much labor in the market, and wages are too low, do not combine to raise the wages; do not combine with the vain hope of compelling the employer to pay more for labor than there are funds for the maintenance of labor: but go out of the market. Leave the relations between wages and labor to equalize themselves…