How could the civil war have been avoided?

Great Debates
181

I don’t know about that, slavery in and of itself isn’t incompatible with a free market. If you view the slaves as plant capital and not as restrained market participants (and that’s a perfectly valid view of the economic situation) then slavery isn’t de facto any type of restraint on the free market.

Special laws and such protecting slave owners from other free market forces can of course violate free market principles. I believe many slaveowners were protected from having their land seized by creditors which is one very artificial protection that kept many economic failure plantations in business for generations.

182

What tariff? 1857? 1846? They favored the South. 1828? Lasted only 4 years and was more than a generation before the Civil War. Whining about it is like bitching about how The Whip Inflation Now campaign is leading us to bomb Syria.

The only bias I see is the long defunct Jeff Davis cult claims that it was all about ‘tariffs’.

183

I disagree entirely. Labor is also a market. When I’m looking for work, I’m trying to sell my skills and knowledge. Or, at least, my time and effort. If someone is allowed to put a gun to my head and make me work for them, then that’s not a market exchange. If the majority of workers in the labor pool are slaves, then the labor market is fundamentally broken. Even if I’m not the one with a gun to my head, the fact that so much of the work is done by slaves is necessarily going to drive down the value of my own labor.

184

Is a stamping machine or a conveyor belt labor?

185

No, those are tools. The person running the machine is the labor.

186

Right, and in the antebellum South the slaves were equivalent to the machines. They had no legal person hood and were specifically called chattel. That puts them on par with livestock or even a mechanical loom of the era, they were capital investments and not selling labor. Even when purchased it wasn’t akin to a labor market transaction, but a capital expenditure.

Free markets as a concept I think are not necessarily positive or negative. If a society’s legal system views certain people as property, then I think one would have to view those individuals as plant equipment and not as part of the labor market. They might influence the labor market, the same way the assembly line belt or electric lighting inside a factory does, but that doesn’t mean they are buyers or sellers in said market.

187

If people are not allowed to freely sell their labor, how can it be called a “free market”?

188

Slaves were not people in the legal sense at all. There is nothing fundamental to free market economics that would make it inappropriate to view human beings as plant equipment if they are in a situation where they are legally prohibited from being part of the labor market.

Slavery was a moral wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense to say it also violated the tenets of free market capitalism just because a person you are arguing with is presumed to be in favor of free market capitalism. It’s entirely possible for something to be gravely wrong and also perfectly free market behavior.

Aspects of the slave economy in the antebellum South are absolutely examples of government protectionism, especially at the State level where slave holders almost invariably dominated every elected office. However slavery as an institution isn’t necessarily incompatible with the free market.

WillFarnaby is espousing strange ideas I disagree with, but he is stumbling around something that is true–by and large wherever they could Northern industrialists absolutely did use their greater power in Congress to advance their interests. They did not specifically have a goal of “punishing” agricultural business but often times policies that help industrialists either hurt the agricultural businesses (at the time, anyway) or at best used finite public resources that could have been more evenly distributed.

189

I think this is pretty ridiculous- it would be like saying that medieval feudalism was a “free market” because Kings and Lords were free to trade labor and goods with other Kings and Lords, even if no one else was- because everyone else weren’t labeled as people.

If a slave society can coexist with a “free market”, then the phrase “free market” has no useful meaning. You can’t define people as not people and still call it free.

190

Well let’s step back, I define a free market as one in which no regulating authority sets prices. I would also posit an expanded definition in which it is a market in which you have both no government price setting, and no “onerous” government interventionism. Onerous is a vague term because it’s not an easy cut and dried issue.

So the agricultural industry in the United States would be “partially free.” The government allows “some” floating of prices and doesn’t involve itself “too much” in regulation but it does provide subsidies and “price floors” on some crops, so you can’t call it fully free. (Fully free market being something I believe doesn’t exist on large scales anyway.)

The regulated power industry would be even less free, the government (through public utility boards) actually does indeed set the pricing there.

It gets more complex when we talk about entire national economies. I’ve demonstrated two somewhat unfree industries in the United States, so how would I classify the country in total? “Mostly free market”, meaning by and large the economy is driven by free exchange of goods and services at prices primarily determined by market participants–but there are unfree elements.

I won’t go into a longer segue now, but I’d argue medieval manor system economies would be “mostly unfree” because of a host of reasons. Many things (especially land) could not be easily bought and sold as individuals had permanent, hereditary rights to control of it regardless of how they used it or whether they even went into debt or whatever. Even in the towns skilled labor was heavily controlled by a guild system which is similar to a cartel and also something incompatible with a truly free market–and I could go on.

So let’s go to the antebellum South, as I said, there were many unfree elements of the economy there. But the simple fact that one of the many “commodities” in the South happened to be human beings, is not in and of itself an immediate bar to it having a free market economy. Even in the slave market, what determined the price of the slave? Well, the buyer and seller, and generally they both agreed that younger, healthy, male slaves trained in a useful skill were the most valuable (blacksmith slaves I believe were historically the most valuable of all.) That doesn’t seem like an external authority is setting the price.

191

Yes, I’m aware. In the antebellum South, slaves were also viewed as inherently inferior to white people, and slavery viewed as the natural and divinely ordained state of the African.

These ideas, along with the idea that slaves were farm equipment, and not farm labor, were all objectively incorrect.

Isn’t that a bit like saying, if you want to discuss the economy of the Soviet Union, you have to do so under the assumption that Communism works? Slavery was a fucked up economic system. In hindsight, we can see that clearly. Slavery was a failing system, even as it’s supporters went to war to protect it. If Southern economists of the era considered slaves as equipment, that may be a major factor in why they were unable to see that their economy was doomed. We should avoid making the same mistake. Slaves are labor. They are part of the labor market. This is a fact, regardless of where you write them down in a ledger.

192

I’d say that government allowing people to buy and sell other people (and restricting the rights of millions to own property, sell their labor, etc.) is pretty damn onerous. If the government says “you can’t sell your labor, you can’t own property, you don’t have freedom of movement”, I’d say that’s a pretty frickin’ onerous restriction, wouldn’t you?

193

I don’t think I can agree with your comment re the Soviet communist system. I think you can look at slavery in the context of a free market economy even if said slave holding enterprises are fundamentally flawed businesses (and in general they were.)

It’s also pretty compelling slaves were not part of the labor market:

  1. They were not paid a wage in exchange for their labor.
  2. Unlike traditional participants in the labor market, they did not select from different employers the job they most desired. Nor do they respond to adverse labor conditions and seek employment elsewhere or leave their employment.
  3. They were actually a physical asset of the business of which they were a part, that the business owner could use as collateral for loans.
  4. The owner could exchange them for capital if they no longer needed them or simply needed quick access to capital.

None of those is consistent with any traditional definition of labor. Slaves did physical work, but so do horses or oxen. Slaves required food and shelter, but so do horses and oxen. Slaves can beget more slaves, but so do horses and oxen. Slaves can reduce the need for traditional labor, but again, so do horses and oxen or steam engines.

Unless we’re asserting human = labor and that’s the end of it, I don’t see how they were actually participants in the labor market. Nor do I think such a simplistic definition of labor really captures the economic situation very well.

194

Actually government hindering business activities through its use of state power makes the market less free. The labor market is technically less free now than it was when we could employ children aged 8 years old to break up coal in coking plants. It’s also less free because of all the organized labor laws passed, all the workplace safety laws passed and etc. Those are examples of government interfering in the operation of the labor market.

The government was not enslaving people in the antebellum south, slave holders were. By and large the government wasn’t responsible for limiting their movement, the slave holders were. Government wasn’t typically even responsible for catching runaway slaves, that was seen mostly as the responsibility of slave holders who in turn typically paid bounties to private citizens who caught runaway slaves. The militia would do patrols and check traveling blacks papers, but that was also a voluntary thing being done at a State government level.

195

I knew about these things. But I figured the subtleties would be wasted on a guy who’s ranting about “the Lincoln cult” and “Whig cronyism”.

196

So you’re saying the government had no part in preventing slaves from freeing themselves and taking part in the economy of the South? You can’t possibly be serious. Without government intervention, some slave rebellions would have actually succeeded- it was force (and threat of force) of armed government intervention that kept slaves from freeing themselves by force- there were millions of them, and some states were majority slave.

This is not hard, and you really seem to be deluding yourself- the government of the South, both before and during the Civil War, actively prevented almost all black people from taking part in the economy. That’s major, major government intervention.

197

That’s not true at all.

Slaves were certainly viewed as inferior to whites, but they were still considered legal persons. Despite what you said earlier, they were not legally viewed as simply chattel.

For example, while it rarely happened, owners who murdered their slaves could in fact be prosecuted for this.

Similarly, if a horse kicked to death his owner, the horse would simply be killed on the spot. Slaves accused of this were given trials, and on rare occasions even acquitted.

A better comparison would be to say they were legally considered to be similar to children.

I’d recommend anyone interested in this subject read Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, though I should warn people that it’s very jargon-heavy.

One of the points he makes is that one of the ironic consequences of Reconstruction is that in many ways Southern blacks of the late-19th and early 20th Century had less rights than their slave ancestors of 60 years prior.

Slaves in 1840s accused of rape, murder, or something similar were given trials and while usually convicted did sometimes get off whereas their grandchildren couldn’t even look forward to a trial but would simply be strung up from the nearest tree.

As he explained. Raw, anti-black hatred, as opposed to simple belief in child-like inferiority, really only came about following reconstruction. Lynchings for example, were exceptionally rare prior to this.

The reason for this was that during Reconstruction, blacks wound up puncturing one of white southerners more cherished fairy tales, that the blacks liked being slaves, loved their masters, and saw themselves as child-like inferiors.

198

All that doesn’t mean that slaves weren’t part of the labor market. It just means that the labor market was distorted and not free. Saying "you’ve got a group of people who aren’t (usually) paid a wage, and who can’t leave their employment’, is basically saying you don’t have a free market in labor. And only did slavery distort the labor market for slaves, it distorted it for free people also, because slaves were competition with free southerners for labor.

199

The only way that makes sense from an ECN101 standpoint is if “the exporting South” was in competition with domestic production. That has little to do with paying higher prices, and more to do with supplying those who could undercut US manufacturing.

200

The traditional definition of labor is “people who work.” I’m not familiar with the definition you’re using. The number of ways slaves were constrained from getting a fair market wage for their labor is not an indication that they were not part of the labor market, it’s an indication that the labor market was highly distorted to favor plantation owners over field laborers.

Now, the economy is made up of many different markets, and it’s possible to have a free market for, say, cotton, and not one for labor. Certainly, the plantation owners were very much in favor of a free market for cotton, because that benefited them personally. They were not in favor of a free market for labor, because that didn’t benefit them. Likewise, they probably would have had no objection to price controls on domestic manufacturing, because that would also benefit them.

The point being, it’s false to say that the South seceded because they wanted a free market. They seceded because they wanted the markets to remain stacked in their favor. Whether this meant that the markets would be free, or tightly controlled, depended entirely on the extent to which it benefited or impeded them. If your the sort of person like WillFarnaby, who judges every issue by how closely the parties involved align with the ideal of free trade, it’s impossible to see how he could align with the slave-holding South, without violating his own principles.

Incidentally, your assertion that the government was enslaving anyone is also ridiculous. “Slave” was a legal classification in the US. The slavery system would not have worked if the government hadn’t created laws recognizing the institution, laying out the limits on the rights of a slave, and defining who was and was not part of the slave class.