Slavery didn't make anyone rich
From iGeek
There's a fallacy amongst the left that Slavery made the South or America rich. Real Economists prove the opposite.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2019-09-19 |
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| A simpler reality is that rich bought slaves -- but nobody got rich over just having a slave.
This is not saying that people didn't make money in the African Slave trade. But that was illegal in America since it's founding. There were others that participated in buying/selling slaves (aka: used car dealers) -- but the profit margins weren't any higher there than any other good at the time. So there's valid arguments to be made about the immorality of participating in it, for the small number of distributors, but I'm more focused on the fallacy that Slaves labor was a huge and clear net win, over other workers. |
Facts[edit | edit source]
- There's a fallacy amongst the left that Slavery made the South or America rich, or "America got rich on the backs of slaves".
- This is debated between fake economists (leftist theologians) and real economists, with most of the real ones recognizing that slavery was not a huge economic win, and was most likely a net burden. (Though they didn't know that at the time).
- That's part of why the North outgrew the South, and why the economy took off after it was abolished. If slavery was so profitable, the South would have been far richer than the north, not the other way around.
- Put simply: as proven over and over again, people will always work harder for themselves than someone else.
- Anywhere that says, "Slavery was free labor" discredits themselves economically by ignoring basic common sense like:
- Cost of capital to buy the slaves
- Operating overhead to feed/house/healthcare
- Security overhead
- Legal and taxes
- the reality that they were generally less productive than paid workers (e.g. independent contractors/sharecroppers).
- I haven't found a good economic comparison of the cost of labor in the North (Immigrants) versus South (Slaves), but it's a pretty safe bet that the economics weren't wildly different, or the South would have been a haven for Slave-Industrial-Might. And culturally?
- It appears that in the 1800's the Southern Plantaton owners often or usually treated their slaves better than Northern Industrialists treated their immigrant labor. We can debate whether that was because of moral superiority, or just economic scarcity. A slave was expensive and valuable (treated at worst like valuable livestock, at best as part of the family), but immigrants were cheap and common and more comming every day. Which is why the North won the civil war: immigrant conscripts that were disposable.
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| The prevailing fear in the South was always that if they freed the slaves, their conditions would go down, and they'd organize and rebel against the whites, as had happened in Carribean Islands. |
That's part of what made slavery so bad -- economically it was harming both sides. There's lots of documentation that many in the South knew it, but they didn't know how to get out from under it.
The left won't every accept this because it destroys the divisive reparations argument: how can you owe money to someone that you lost money on? Since the left would have to give up dividing us for votes by admitting the truth, they'll take repeat the anti-science and anti-logic position, no matter what the math/logic says.
Slavery[edit source]
Main article: Slavery
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🔗 Links
- https://nas.org/blogs/dicta/slavery-did-not-make-america-rich
- https://mises.org/wire/left-argues-slavery-was-economic-blessing-heres-why-they-are-wrong
