“The storekeeper and the clerk depended for their livelihood on selling the goods in your day. Of course that is all different now. The goods are the nation’s. … ‘But even the 20th-century clerk might make himself useful by giving you information about the goods, though he did not tease you to buy them,’ I suggested. ‘No,’ said Edith, ‘… these printed cards, for which the government authorities are responsible, give us all the information we can possibly need.’”
The 19th-century “Julian West” waking up in Boston in the year 2000 to find out it has become a socialist utopia. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, January 1888.
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