June 18, 2026
Landlords vs progress: FIGHT
How Smashing The NIMBYs Created Modern Capitalism
Britain’s old rulebook got torched — and commenters say Taiwan did it better
TLDR: The article says England’s 1688 political shake-up helped clear land and building roadblocks, setting the stage for modern economic growth. But the comments quickly pushed back, with the hottest reaction arguing Taiwan’s peaceful land reform is a much better example for people trying to fix today’s gridlock.
A big, spicy historical claim just hit the timeline: modern capitalism may have been born not in a factory, but in a political cleanup job. The article argues that after England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution, Parliament finally cut through a maze of overlapping land rights and local vetoes that had made roads, farming upgrades, and long-term investment painfully hard. In plain English: too many people could say "no," so nothing big got built. Smash that gridlock, the argument goes, and you unlock growth.
But the real fireworks in the discussion came from people instantly side-eyeing the history lesson and asking: why are we talking about 1688 when there are modern examples? The standout community reaction came from quadhome, who basically slammed the brakes on the whole old-England framing and pointed to Taiwan’s bloodless land reform as the more relevant case study, even dropping a link like a receipts folder in the middle of an argument. That turned the vibe from dusty-history seminar to "show us a real-world version that matters now".
So the mood was less "wow, glorious" and more "interesting thesis, but can we get an update patch?" There’s also a darkly funny undertone here: a story about defeating obstruction immediately inspired its own mini veto from the comments. Nothing says internet debate like responding to a grand theory of progress with, effectively, "counterpoint: wrong century".
Key Points
- •The article argues that England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution helped create conditions for later industrialization by giving Parliament power to restructure fragmented property rights.
- •The article describes seventeenth-century Europe as economically stagnant and heavily agrarian despite advances in intellectual institutions such as patent systems and learned societies.
- •It cites low urbanization and high agricultural employment across Europe as evidence of limited structural economic change before industrialization.
- •The article attributes weak growth partly to fragmented land ownership, rigid inheritance rules, and poor transport infrastructure that reduced incentives for investment and specialization.
- •It says reform efforts in other European states, including Spain under Fernando VI and France under Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, were blocked by entrenched elites such as nobles and clergy.