Blogger Timothy Sandefur has an interesting item questioning the argument that the inefficiency of using slaves rather than free labour would have gradually eroded the institution anyway, such as in the Old South of the US. He makes the point that as far as the owners of slaves are concerned, maximising wealth may not be the only reason why they keep slaves, so the inefficiency of this repulsive institution may not prove fatal to it. In other words, it would be naive for defenders of say, the Confederacy, to argue that a war was not necessary to get rid of this institution.
Sometimes, oppression does not just wither away. A loathesome institution or regime can endure for a long time. You need action, sometimes involving bullets, to remove these evils. For those of a pacific nature, this is not a comforting conclusion.
Here is an article I wrote some time back celebrating one of the great British campaigners against slavery, Thomas Clarkson, who is a lot less well known than William Wilberforce. Reading through the comment thread reminded me that a lot of people imagine that free marketeers like me claim that capitalism will inevitably weaken slavery. There is nothing inevitable about the demise of any human institution, certainly not one that satisifies the human lust for power over others.
Sometimes, you see slavery (US version) defended as being the best thing to ever happen to black Americans. The dumbasses like to claim that Africa is a bad place and that bringing folks to the US (in chains, whipping them and splitting up families) saved them from malaria and illiteracy and heathenism and so on.
People who are that particular combination of stupid and wrong are IMHO unlikely to be persuaded by an argument about how slavery was or was not dying out due to economic inefficiency.
Besides, I seem to remember that slavery was supposed to have died out by 1800 due to increased efficiency in tobacco production, or at least less need for labor. Of course, then someone found another crop that wouldn’t be picked in the summertime by anyone with a choice in the matter…
Slavery still exists today. In Brazil, to cite a single example, slaves are used to harvest sugar cane. To say nothing of the rampant sex slavery across the world.
Slavery will exist for as long as it is possible to practice. It must be stamped out with force.
My understanding was the works of Adam Smith were influential in ending slavery in the British Empire.
The point is the economic arguments he advanced don’t matter a jot if you don’t believe them or choose to ignore them.
Now I don’t know if life in the ante-bellum South really was all Scarlett O’Hara and mint julips on the stoop but I’m sure there were more than enough plantation owners who were doing pretty well for themselves and therefore didn’t care or appreciate there was a more efficient way and took an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” view. Maybe they just didn’t care for a dramatic upheavel of their businesses.
Tradition is also a powerful force. As indeed is pure racism.
I’ve said a couple of times that libertarians tend IMV to be too focussed on economics and economic answers for everything, often ignoring simple human nature and culture etc in a quest to treat everyone as a (rational) economic unit. Economics is of course extremely important, and the economy is an interwoven, major part of human society, but it isn’t everything (although we can apply economic arguments, often illuminatingly, to non-goods “markets” e.g. politics or social arrangements it’s not quite the same thing). As a few posts down with “the market isn’t perfect” thing, people frequently operate against their best economic interests. Hell, I do. I made more money as an engineer than as a comic artist. I just like drawing rude comics more than electrical fault finding, so I do the comcs.
Libertarianism is to my mind fundamented on principles and rights; from that the necessity of free markets is apparent (and of course free markets are more efficient than managed ones, and free markets are “just what happens” if the big clunking fist of government doesn’t interfere).
But one vital libertarian principle is equality of all human beings before the law, and the inviolability of the right to self determination (within the bounds of not harming others). In any libertarian society, slavery would be simply impossible because it violates those most basic rights. We don’t need, and shouldn’t appeal to economic arguments to justify our position on that. It’s a moral position, not an economic one. So in a free society slavery would be intrinsically impossible.
The realities of human existence may well mean you need to shoot quite a few bastards to get there.
Ian, you are a libertarian yourself, so clearly not all libertarians think as you claim they do. In fact, if one looks at some of the classical liberals of the past, such as von Mises or for that matter, Adam Smith, they realise that the model of Man as a wealth maximiser is a bit misleading. What is important is the idea of humans as desiring to increase their happiness and satisfaction, which can include non-material as well as material things, such as friendship, leisure time, and so on. And for these things to be achieved, we need liberty. And to get liberty is not an automatic process: it requires effort, it requires resistance to thugs.
I didn’t mean to claim that Johnathan. I mean that if one looks around at libertarian writing e.g. from a websearch you tend to find perhaps more than I’d like about economics and less about the more human side of things. It’s easy to get the impression that libertarianism is capitalism and a libertarian would kind of slavishly follow the economic argument regardless of other matters, e.g. if slavery were more efficient, we’d support it. Kind of thing. This makes us easy targets for the left, who like to inhabit a moral high ground. It gives the impression that they care about people, and we just care about money. I think that’s a perception we need to challenge and more emphasis on the principled and moral side would be helpful. It’s a matter of presentation, really.
Ian,
Someone here, some months back, caught exactly the same point that you just made. It was the first time I’d seen it put in this way:
For slavery to exist, exceptions would need to be carved out in the criminal law that would otherwise simply apply equally to everybody. Slavery simply cannot exist where kidnapping, false imprisonment, extortion, assault, menacing, rape, robbery, and theft are actually illegal and where the laws are evenly enforced.
I think that most of the people, who you accuse of being too fixated on economics, are actually not thinking of economics at all. However, they’ve gotten used to thinking in those terms and so they use economic terms as a symbol or surrogate for moral or ethical words.
I might have asked you “Excuse me, but did you take the last cup of coffee?” Or I could ask, ?Perdon, tomaste la ultima de la cafe`? Exact same concepts, questions, and thoughts. Just a different language.
Well, if would-be slavers didn’t want to be shot in self-defense then they shouldn’t have committed the kinds of crimes that might cause reasonable people to have to defend themselves.
Ian, I agree. To an extent, the reason why so much libertarian writing has had a strong economic tilt is that the initial fightback against collectivism etc, occured in the economics field. That was where the worst inroads were made by socialism and consequently, where much of the initial fightback started.. Think of all the major figures in the libertarian movement: M. Friedman, his son David, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Arthur Seldon, etc. Most were economists by training. But even so, many of these writers realised that there is much more than just getting and spending; if you read Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, for example, it is full of arguments about law, morality, tradition, and so on.
And of course the more “natural rights” wing of the libertarian movement – Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Rasmussen, Ayn Rand, John Hospers, etc – write a lot about the moral side of the case for liberty. In fact that aspect dominates their writings, I would argue.
In fact, if you read any of these people, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are motivated by a deep seated love of freedom that is more than just about GDP per head or whatever.
Ian, I agree. To an extent, the reason why so much libertarian writing has had a strong economic tilt is that the initial fightback against collectivism etc, occured in the economics field. That was where the worst inroads were made by socialism and consequently, where much of the initial fightback started.. Think of all the major figures in the libertarian movement: M. Friedman, his son David, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Arthur Seldon, etc. Most were economists by training. But even so, many of these writers realised that there is much more than just getting and spending; if you read Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, for example, it is full of arguments about law, morality, tradition, and so on.
And of course the more “natural rights” wing of the libertarian movement – Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Rasmussen, Ayn Rand, John Hospers, etc – write a lot about the moral side of the case for liberty. In fact that aspect dominates their writings, I would argue.
In fact, if you read any of these people, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are motivated by a deep seated love of freedom that is more than just about GDP per head or whatever.
“If fire break out in a house, and some one who comes to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house, and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self-same fire.”
-Hammurabi’s Code
To put it another way: (lesser evil != good)
There are two issues which need to be separated here, if we’re talking about the American Civil War; whether the war was necessary to abolish slavery, and whether the war was fought in order to abolish slavery. It may be argued that the war was necessary to remove slavery (though it wasn’t necessary elsewhere, even in economies more wedded to slavery than that of the South – eg. Russia pre-1861), but those libertarians “defending” the Confederacy do so not on the grounds that the South was right in imposing slavery, but that the war was not fought primarily over slavery. In his inaugural address in 1861, Lincoln explicitly stated:
Lincoln ought not to be in the same category as William Wilberforce, or even Alexander II, since slavery was never his primary concern. He ought more properly to placed with Bismarck and Garibaldi, since his aim was to create a much stronger central state and crush local autonomy. In that same speech, he makes plain that the “power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” Seeing as he is quite clear that abolishing slavery doesn’t fall in that narrow criteria of presidential power, that he chose not to do so in enemy territory (not under his control) until 1863 and permitted various Union States to retain slavery, it makes no sense to attribute to his waging of the ‘Civil War’ the goal of removing this institution.
The principle of secession must be separated from the institutions that exist in a seceding state. The defence of the South is strictly not a defence of slavery: indeed, arguably the most prominent modern libertarian defender of the South is Rothbard, whose entire philosophy is predicated on the repudiation of slavery in principle.
On the point about slavery being inefficient, I always despair when I read Mises’ chapter in Liberalism about the difference between classical and neo-liberals, when he tries to argue that it is in the interest of slave owners to cease to own their slaves, since they’ll be more productive as free men. He seems to have missed the obvious, that they’ll be more productive for themselves, and so the slave owner loses out.
I’m not convinced that’s true anyway. The average worker has no more incentive to work beyond the level set by their boss than a slave has. If you pay me to pick cotton, I’ll pick as little as I can get away with without losing my job, as a rational agent.
“capitalism will inevitably weaken slavery”
Eh?
Where there is slavery, there is not capitalism.
fififi, you miss the point, rather. If you have a free market in goods and services, but not labour, as happened in early 19th century America, then you can have a society that is capitalist in some ways and not in others.
Capitalism can co-exist with certain forms of oppression, although it tends to work best without it.
I don’t know of anyone intelligent, or even unintelligent, who seriously argues this. Slavery is an unmitigated evil.
But, in the U.S., there are fringe groups who claim the descendants of black slaves in the U.S. should be paid some form of monetary reparations. In that context, I think it is both correct and appropriate to point out that the descendants of black slaves in the U.S. today are unquestionably better off than if they had been born in any of the modern African countries today where the slaves were kidnapped from in times past.
This does not seem to be an arguable point, at least to me, given per capita income, life expectancy, infant mortality etc comparisons between blacks in the US today and blacks in Africa today.
The idea that slavery had become uneconomical and was about to die of its own weight by the time of the Civil War was based on the teachings and research of historian U.B. Phillips at the end of the 19th and early 20th century.
This thesis remained dominant in American historical thought until it got a thorough debunking by the work of Fogel, Engerman and others beginning in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It is now well established by documented research that slavery in the Ante-Bellum South was an economically vigorous institution, if a peculiar one, and that it was not on the verge of extinction for economic reasons.
That may be one reason the South fought so hard to save it.
No-one seems to have hit on the fact that slave-owning societies lose the incentives to innovate and be creative. If you have a dozen or so slaves to do all the work like toting barges and lifting bales you tend not to look for an easier way out. Servants/slaves are a big drag on resourcefulness. In the end the slave soxcieties become enslaved themselves.
Ian
As a rational agent, and a free man, I may work extremely hard for an employer if I believe that in the longer term I will benefit through promotion, increased wages, bonuses. etc.
As an employer I know that, if I recruit sufficiently motivated employees, and incentivise them in the right way, they can become highly productive. Their self-interest is satisfied and in turn so is mine as an employer.
As a matter of history there was no sign that the institution of slavery was in decline in the South in 1861 (when the was started).
Indeed the institution was stronger and less under challenge in the South in 1861 than it had been a century before.
You’re talking about careers, not jobs, and I think sometimes people don’t realise the difference, especially economists who are career people with friends who all have careers etc.
Picking cotton isn’t a career, it’s a job. You pick cotton, you get paid. You may have ambitions to be chief picker, but most pickers aren’t working for any career ambition, they’re just getting paid to pick cotton. As with many jobs.
If the person isn’t attempting to curry favour with an employer to gain promotion, then the incentives are similar to being a slave, except that the employer has less extreme sanctions to use against slackers (the worst is to get sacked, whereas a slave can be whipped, brutalised, his family similarly, sold or even killed). There is no incentive in a joe job to increase productivity beyond that which is enforced, neither do employers in general expect more from such ordinary staff than the minimum. If you’re told to make 1000 widgets an hour, that’s what they’ll get from you.
I seriously doubt there’s any more productivity to be had from an average factory worker than from an average slave (if the slave is kept in reasonable conditions). Such workers e.g. in Victorian Britain worked very long hours in appalling conditions, because they had no choice, not in the hope of career advancement or because of some internal motivation (though worthies attempted to impose such implementaton with preaching about work ethics and so on). They did the work because failure to do so meant starving to death, much the same incentives package as a slave is offered, in fact.
For some reason the second occurrence of “motivation” got turned into “implementation” thar. I have no idea why.
Andrew Roocroft,
Your reading of Lincoln obscures the very issue that put him into office ahead of Stephen Douglas. Lincoln did not want to uproot slavery as it existed in the South, but he most emphatically wanted to keep it restricted to there.
At issue were the Western territories. The slave states worked hard to extend the practice of slavery into the new territories, which alarmed the North for reasons both moral, economic, and political: they saw the slavers as a new feudalism which sought to engulf the American republic. Lincoln’s key issue was to keep the West free of slavery.
See Michael Sandel, “Democracy’s Discontents.”
I agree with Jonathan- in one word: Caecescu. The tree of liberty can also use the blood of tyrants, although this doesn’t happen as often as it should.
Probably because your internal grammar police were nagging you about repetition but wouldn’t let you utter the bastardized incentivisation.
As to the institution of slavery, it would probably be simplistic to say that it started with invention of farming and ended with the invention of tractors.
Mastiff,
Lincoln was, in fact, an abolitionist, but one of those who believed that, if prevented from expanding to the West and restricted to the South, slavery would die out on its own. He was wrong, but slandering him as unconcerned with it, as Andrew Roocroft appears to be doing, is utter nonsense. He was widely known as a staunch opponent of slavery since the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, and his election was viewed in the South as a direct attack on them and their “peculiar institution”.
Ian,
The fundamental statement of “Thou shalt not initiate the use of force”, which underlies libertarian thinking, is derived from both pragmatism, a desire not to be pushed around, and morality, a belief that it is wrong to push others around. In any one case, whatever its provenance, that statement would seem to make the existence of slavery within a libertarian society impossible.
The issue of free markets is simply an emergent property of libertarian principles, not an aim in itself.
However, it is possible, although not necessary, to describe any human interaction in market terms. Ian’s point that this would not be a good way to convert many people to libertarianism is a good one, though:-)
Alisa,
Absolutely. Describing morality in market/economic terms is relatively simple, but a really really bad mistake.
That is why I so often find myself presenting the libertarian POV in both moral and utilitarian terms, and eschewing the economic argument.
I haven’t seen so much poppycock in many a year. Anyone who believes slavery is an efficient or effective means of production seems not to have obeserved the weak economies of communist nations where the government pretends to pay its workers and the people pretend to work.
As far as the evils of slavery go the North came up with a much more humane and efficient form of labor unitization be working women and children to death and discarding those who were disabled. Seems like the Northern solution was so much more humane.
As for the glories of Africa, exactly when was this utopian period in the glory of Africa. I spent years there and witnessed the collapse of Mozambique and Angola not to mention tyhe fabulous success of Zaire and Rhodesia. Anyone who speaks in glowing terms of Africa probably loved vacation at Devil’s Island as well.
Slavery presents little incentive for workers to excel and less for societies to become competitive. The failure of the Southern economy was preordained. The only societies that continue to employ slavery are the progressive ones and those who like to be described as the religion of peace. I of course place Western governments in a special category since they allow their slaves to retain half of their earnings, although with the growing trend toward Carterism I think this per centage will decline as the progressives seek to fund more Big Dig and Great Society type black holes.
As someone from a long time southern family, I admit to being perplexed by some of the comments. Especially the first one by Sunfish.
I think I disagree with almost every single part that post. I don’t even know where to being. A new summer crop?
Blacks and whites farmed my family’s farm in Georgia for over 150 years. And my family never owned slaves. Not a one.
Since I beleive most of the posters here are English I would encourage you to look a little deeper into American history.
First, I don’t want to diminish the fact that some in the South wanted to keep their slaves. Uhmm… those were the wealthy land-owners from England. But I would have you ask the following question: How many in the South actually owned slaves?
Just take a guess. 10, 20 30% of the population? Most of the population was too poor to own slaves. Out of 5.5 million Southerners in 1860, only 46,000 planters owned 20 slaves, less than 3,000 owned 100 or more slaves, and only 12 Southerners owned 500 or more slaves. I am not sure if that factors out the free blacks and native American Indians that owned slaves?
Now ask yourself this question: Who actually fought for the South.
I’ll break it down as much as possible. Please grant me a little leeway since I am sort of rushing this.
The English forced the lowland Scots to Northern Ireland.
The Irish really didn’t like them that much. Alot went to America and settled in the South and were finally rid of those English bastards… or so they thought.
When the North, mostly English decent, decided to quit the crown those Scots-Irish in TN, GA, AL, W. NC and SC and KY sat it out for awhile. (The Virginians and E. NC and SC were mostly wealthy English so they don’t count.)
The English had Washington pinned down up North and then some English General had the great idea, “Those fargin’ Scots-Irish might cause some trouble. Let’s go burn some towns down so they will be too afraid to screw with us.”
The Scots-Irish didn’t like the English following them 7,000 miles and burning stuff down.
They started fighting the English in the South. The English had to send reinforcements down to the South. That freed up Washington and that part is history.
Since, the Northerners, were mostly English in America those poor Scots-Irish really didn’t like them that much either.
In the South the only people who could afford slaves were the English-Americans. The poor white trash in the South really didn’t care that much about what the aristocrats did. Then some in the North decided they wanted to come down and teach those English slave owners a lesson. Unfortunately, those Scots-Irish considered it just another invasion by the English.
For them, the Yanks were really just the English all over again.
Which is why it always makes me cringe when I am in Europe and someone calls me a Yank.
Now I acknowledge it is more complex than all that, but don’t diminish that aspect of it by saying the American Civil War was about slavery. My family fought in the war and had no slaves.
But my decedants got kicked out of Scotland and then Ireland. We thought we’d be safe from you guys down South. We were wrong and we made you pay in the Revolutionary war and then we fought you about 1 to 10 in the Civil War and it still took those Yanks/English 4 years.
; – )
Free men are more productive than slaves, because free men have the use of their minds, whereas slaves are just dumb muscle. A free man, however, only works for himself. Thus, from the point of view of a slave driver, a free man would indeed seem to be less productive than a slave.
I think that’s a presumption that I’d challenge. When slavery was still extant, the western productive economy was largely based on using mass labour as “dumb muscle”- factory workers and agricultural workers doing simple repetitive jobs. Many of them were little better than slaves. On the other side of the coin, some slaves did quite “responsible” jobs for instance working as servants, looking after children and as the original linked article here says
In the southern USA, slaves were simply their um “lower proleteriat.”
While I’m at it I’m not entirely convinced by the argument that the existence of slaves prevents technical innovation as presented by Millie either. Slaves bring with them costs; keeping a large army of slave labour costs resources and inhibits efficiency compared to a mechanised alternative. If we think of slaves in slavers’ terms- as “draft animals”- we should note that the availability of oxen didn’t inhibit the introduction of the tractor.
A business that uses 100 slaves will be hopelessly beaten by a business which has 10 slaves running machines that do the work of 100 men doing the work by hand. The inefficiencies of slavery are the same as the inefficiencies of any hand labour compared to mechanisation.
Replying to me, Bill said:
I have heard the argument that I quoted. I used the term “dumbass” for its proponents, intentionally.
As for your statement that “Slavery is an unmitigated evil,” that’s why I ignore discussions about how economically efficient slavery is. The efficiency is utterly irrelevant. It would be more efficient to give rohypnol to tri-delts than to go out looking for women who actually want to sleep with me, or more efficient to walk into a bank and stick a gun in the teller’s face instead of going to work, but that’s not the point. Evil is evil, end of discussion.
And as far as the US Civil War tangent, my attitude is very simple: fuck the South. They made it their sectional agenda to cram slavery down the throats of the free states[1] for the few decades before the war. That’s why I oscillate between “let them have their independence and choke on it” and “Sherman was too kind and gentle.”
Frankly, I think the rest of us would have been better off without the Confederacy. No SE US means no Huey Long, no Klan, no Lyndon Johnson, no Jimmy Carter, no Billy Jeff Clinton, no Ray Nagin, no Kathleen Blanco, no Mike Huckabee, no Lyndon Johnson the Second (AKA GW Bush). The only downside I can think of is if my native city (in one of the border states) ended up part of the Confederacy. And that’s only really a negative for me, since I didn’t want to live there.
(To say nothing of some of Lincoln’s behavior during the war that might not have happened without the war as an excuse…)
[1] See “westward expansion.” See also “forcing Amish and Quakers in Pennsylvania to round up escaped slaves.”
Sunfish, that list you put up there is instructive (although at least technically W doesn’t belong on it). My immediate instinct was to say that without the South, the North would have been perpetually ruled by lefties, but now that you put it this way…
Ody
I do not deny that most of the white Southerners were not slave owners – especially not the Scots-Irish (if you do not like the “R word”) whose forefather had won such battles as Kings Mountain.
However, the leaders of the South faught the war out of fear of a threat to slavery – it was not really (contrary to the Rothbardians) about taxes on imports and other such.
Indeed some in the South saw that all the talk of “freedom” was all B.S. covering the interests of slave plantation owners – that is why West Virginia broke away from the rest of Virginia. After all the leaders of Virginia had never had any problem with taxing the western part of the State to finance “internal improvements” in the slave ownering eastern part of the State – so claims that they were opposed to such statism in Washington D.C. rang hollow.
As for Lincoln – he was very flawed (to put in mildly). He was vile in Illinois politics and believed in all sorts of Henry Clay Whig stuff at the Federal level.
And he messed up the management of the war as well – sure the Union won, but (given the disparity in numbers and resources) it should have won without the deaths of anything like 600, 000 people
But I would have still supported the Union – as Sam Houston did (thus meaning that people who wanted to break away in Texas had to ignore their own Founding Father) and as General George Thomas (of Virginia) did and as General Lee almost did – Lincoln just failed to convince him (perhaps a better President would have convinced Lee and a lot of others and there would have been no war at all).
The Republicans should have nominated Salmon P. Chase in 1860 (then there could have been no claims that the war about taxes on imports – or that the candidate had only recently become hostile to slavery) – but they nominated who they did.
And, whatever the Rothbardians like to pretend, the war was really about the institution of slavery.
Alisa,
GWB is a Texas politician who succeeded a popular Democrat, and presided over an unpopular war while vastly increasing spending on social programs. Which makes him basically an LBJ for today.
The difference is, LBJ dreamed up his own dirty electoral tricks. GWB had people to do that for him.
Not for the average soldier who fought like hell and didn’t own slaves. Maybe for the weathy, but they needed soldiers.
I have stories and letters passed down in my family about our history in America. Saying that they fought for slavery when they didn’t own slaves is just wrong. They fought, but for other reasons. Like many of the soldiers at the time.
The war is complex from all angles. But just to write it off to slavery is an over-simplification of the issues. Robert E. Lee wrote that slavery was evil, but at the same time owned slaves.
So many try to impose today’s values on yesterdays without perspective on the difference of the times. The world was a different place then.
The wealthy people wanted their slaves, no debating it. But the average soldier wasn’t motivated by slavery. They didn’t even own them.
It’s like when people originally claimed that Bush invaded Iraq for cheap oil.
I feel confident in saying that no soldier went to Iraq thinking, “Yeah, let’s go fight a war over oil.”
The real efficiency of slavery, at least in the Old South, was that you had total control of your labor force. Meaning they could not quit for a better job or to move away, or strike for higher wages.
As for abolition, the question remains why the US saw the only actual war over slavery, if that it what it was. Every other country (i.e. Brazil, the biggest slaver by far) managed to abolish it peacefully.
Sunfish: all I meant was that he is not from the SE.
For the record, I recall an analysis that James Michener put into his book Chesapeake. IIRC, it stated that a plantation owner could realize a return on investment of about 13% a year on a slave run plantation. This is not bad. This is not a dying institution.
I didn’t see links to the analysis that slavery was inefficient, etc., so I mention it. Not to justify slavery or anything.
Ozzy Mandius – there is a problem with your definition that betrays a lack of understanding of something of real importance …
Try an updated version of your first sentence – it becomes “The real afficiency of computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do, and very fast, too !”
The *reality*, however, is that, yes, they do what you tell them to do – yet that is not always what you *want* them to do …
Where a free man is likely to be more productive than a slave can be seen in that a free man can be motivated positively to strive to do what you want him to do, even when you phrase it badly …
A slave is more likely to do the minimum required for survival, and will usually not be motivated by any form of loyalty to try to be helpful, too …
Sunfish,
When you said fuck the South and made your list… your forgot:
No Sherman (He learned to fight in the bloody Seminole war in Florida.)
No powerful military to fight World War 1
No MLK
No getting rid of the sundown towns in the North where most of them existed
No NASA
No affordable and fast growing locations in the US today
No Krispy Kreme
No Coca Cola
No Pepsi
No SEC
No Thomas Jefferson
No Woodrow Wilson
No Elvis Presley
I could go on, but I think that is enough
Interesting discussion — but you are all missing the point. Slavery was primarily an energy issue. Slavery was the first form of Renewable Energy.
Slavery was an ancient issue even in Old Testament times. It started somewhere back before the dawn of history, probably driven by the invention of agriculture in Mesopotamia after the end of the most recent Ice Age. Farming was hard work, and it became more energy efficient to capture human beings and use them as forced labor.
What brought slavery to an end around the world in the 1800s, after a successful run of about 7,000 years? The answer is fairly clear — it was the invention of the steam engine, fueled by coal. Slavery could not compete with fossil fuels as a source of energy.
Now the Granolas want to end the use of fossil fuels, and return us (we low class working stiffs, not their elite selves) to the days of Renewable Energy. Or Slavery, as we should more properly call it.
And many of the best fighters for the Union were from the South and some Southern States stayed loyal to the Union.
I did not support going into Iraq (although I do not support running away now either), but I do not believe it was a “war for oil”, that charge is normally made by people who also like to say the war in Iraq is “another Vietnam” (where there was no oil – or anything else).
But for the POLITICAL leaders of the South the war was about slavery – not for the Generals (like Lee or Stonewall Jackson) but for the political leaders.
I can only think of two Southern political leaders who had any regard even for the liberty of white people (let alone black) – the Vice President of the Confederacy, and Governor Vance of North Carolina.
The rest of them were so bad they even made Lincoln (with all his violations of civil liberties) look good in comparison.
“There is nothing inevitable about the demise of any human institution, certainly not one that satisifies the human lust for power over others.”
BEFORE the civil war.
You really think we only had a military because of the south? Not to mention, whether WWI was a good idea is still an unresolved question.
And not a whole lot of need for him up north.
No idea what you’re talking about.
1) There could easily be a NASA based somewhere other than Houston.
2) No NASA means fewer barriers to private space exploration.
More likely they’d be somewhere else. Not that I’d call “fast-growing” a blessing: that’s a term useful to describe both cancer and Highlands Ranch, CO, and is not desireable in either case.
So we’d get sugary food and juvenile adult-onset diabetes from somewhere else.
We’d still have the Big 10, PAC-10, the service academies, and most of the Big 8 (and I’m not sure what Texas brought to the table anyway.)
1) Again, that was before the civil war.
2) That’s also the only thing you’ve cited that would actually be a loss.
The first real no-shit fascist dictator of the 20th century? Good riddance. He’d have fit in well with the government of the Confederacy, as cited by Paul.
Again, I’ll try to make myself sit up at night trembling for the poor bastards in some parallel universe who didn’t have Elvis frying up Demerol in bacon grease in Formula 44D sauce, calling Cadillac dealers all night long, and shooting televisions. Same with Hank Williams Jr.: not nearly enough to justify keeping all of the problems that fighting the civil war and keeping the South gave us.
Alisa:
I know, but I’m trying to figure out how to define ‘south’ in a way that would include Texas but not New Mexico or Arizona. Someone who hasn’t lived in the US might not have known to make the distinction.
I doubt it can be done. TX would have to have a category of its own:-)
Ody, I am not at all as ready as Sunfish to write the South off, but that list was pathetic. Surely someone can do better than that! (Or were you being sarcastic?)
Alisa,
I was being a bit sarcastic. I can’t really take Sunfish seriously. It would be really easy to right off any part of the world with the mentality exhibited.
How can I take anyone seriously who thinks there was not a need for MLK up north?
The north had more sundown towns. The north had segration and racism. Yes, they lacked slavery but blacks weren’t living the good life up north pre or post Civil War. Even today the race riots in this country take place in the north and the west. Not the south.
How can I take someone seriously when they aren’t aware of how the Civil War impacted the US military in the years aftwards.
He calls Wilson a dictator… who was voted out of office. He’s not serious.
He also seems to think that Houston represents NASA in the South, without regard to AL, VA, LA and FL.
Perhaps we could right off the North if we were going ot focus on rude and judgmental.