The primordial state of man is poverty. Nature is unforgiving in its scarcity of available means. On a fixed amount of land with a fixed amount of technology, there is a physical limit to the output of labor. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe observes:

Only one way exists for such a stationary society to further increase real income per head or to grow in size without a loss in per capita income: through technological innovation, i.e., by the employment of better, more efficient tools made possible through savings brought about by the abstention from leisure or other immediate consumption.

He concludes that only through the process of lowering time preference, so as to accumulate an increasing amount of capital goods and technology, was it possible to break out of the Malthusian trap set by the limits of resources immediately available by kickstarting the Industrial Revolution.

Without a certain amount of capital and production, standards of living we take for granted are not physically possible. During the Industrial Revolution, many children had to find work in dangerous factories in order to help earn income for the family. The way out was through what George Reisman called “the productivity theory of wages.” An increase in productivity, through capital accumulation, means each monetary unit earned can fetch more consumer goods in the marketplace. Through this process, families could earn enough resources with fewer wage earners. Children could leave the factories, and more leisure could be afforded generally.

However, tools are merely tools, and a public ideology can prevent their most productive use. Mark Thornton points out that the abhorrent use of slave labor, while rendered increasingly unprofitable by industrial progress in the process described above, remained in practice until its violent and bloody abolition, because of aggressive state intervention in the form of mandated slave patrols and prohibition of private manumission of slaves.