Did you read the quote? 
Ummm… yes ? I’m sorry, I must have been distracted, where does the “learning thing you didn’t know” part comes in ?
Ummm… yes ? I’m sorry, I must have been distracted, where does the “learning thing you didn’t know” part comes in ? Or was I particularly special for having read* Passengers of the Wind* at age 14 ?
“maintaining a system that incurred more costs than gains to them”=/=“benevolent slaveowners who took care of grateful slaves”
except in your mind which goes bonkers when the issue of race comes up.
“They were about making money by any means necessary even if it came at the expense of other people’s humanity and civil rights.”
Which doesn’t exclude that they could have been wrong about the most efficient way to make money or that there could have been a collective action problem among agriculturalists when it came to slavery.
“it is harder to see slavery as an intentional set of atrocious actions taken to accomplish a selfish, purposeful goal if one is under the impression that the slave-owning elite were bumbling fools who didn’t know what was good for them.”
Utter bullshit. One can see others as monstrous and stupid/grossly mistaken without any problems. The Nazi allocation of resources to the Holocaust while they were fighting the USSR being the prime example. The KKK is not known for having particularly bright members. Indeed, a lot of monstrous or messed up people are dim or unable to think/consider anything else than what they’ve grown used to.
I note your goalpost-moving here. At first, you said that it was “misconceptions and blinkered thinking” which was “not supported by fact and its not supported by common sense”. Now you’re merely saying that it’s harder to see slavery as atrocious if one believes it.
I don’t know if you took a timeout from race talk after your Zimmerman-related pit thread but maybe it’s time for another.
Do you have anything of substance to bring to this discussion? All I’m seeing is a poorly edited post infested with banality and jabs.
You know how I know you’re gay?
I did, and I agree with Steve MB. He doesn’t seem familiar with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Chapter 45 (the final chapter) is about her sources. It’s part of the book. The most sensational elements in the novel - the women escaping across the Ohio River on ice floes - slaves whipped to death - slaves being promised freedom by a kindly owner, only to have them die and a nasty heir treat them worse than ever - Simon Legree types who took pride in how hard they could hit slaves - were all based on real people and incidents.
Right, but he didn’t believe any of that because he was told it was all lies.
In the article, he claims he was told to dismiss what was in the book by people who wrote Stowe off as a “propagandist”. Just because it’s “part of the book” doesn’t mean anything if you’re inclined to see the whole thing as exaggerated fiction.
Can you copy the text that you’re reading that allows you to infer he is unfamiliar with the book? Obviously I’m not reading all the scorn-worthy things in that article that yall are.
Yes, that Steve MB is right and that the two assertions are orthogonal. Also, that your failure to see this and your insistence on making unwarranted inferences is due to your issues with race.
You say that
I think slavery was economically inefficient and harmful to the masters as well as to the slaves yet I do not think that slaveowners were benevolent or that the slaves were grateful. Many people are able to make the distinction which you deny.
How do you think slavery harmed the slavers?
Do you think that without slaves, the people who owned these massive plantation enterprises would have been even better off economically? Do you think they and their families would have been more represented in politics, had it not been for the power they amassed through slave-derived wealth? How do you think their lot in life would have been better if slavery hadn’t existed?
At what time, if any, did slaves ever stop being a profitable investment to the vast majority of slaveowners?
Can you name one slaveowner who ended up poorer than he started because he chose to run his business using slave instead of wage labor?
Substantiate your assertions if you think I’m wrong enough to call me bonkers, please.
Somewhere between 1861 and 1865, I’d imagine.
I am not sure this is exactly what MichaelEMouse is saying, but there is an argument that the South’s reliance on slavery crippled its economic development because the region relied on plantation slavery instead of developing an industrialized economy like the North did. Once in a while you’ll see a libertarian kook argue that you guys, if there had been no war slavery would have died out a decade or two later anyway because people always obey pure profit motives, and duh, the North was so stupid. I hate you, Lincoln, you’re not my real Dad!
And don’t forget that slavery isn’t just an economic system. It’s a social and political system. How much would you pay to have people bow and scrape and call you master? Even if it were cheaper to hire free laborers on your plantation, the slaveowner might still choose slaves because he likes being a master rather than a boss.
I guess the way to think of this is that slavery was about both production and consumption. Slaves worked in the fields to grow cash crops, but they also were cooks, concubines, tailors, butlers, maids, nannies, and so on. A house slave doesn’t generate money for the master, but the master doesn’t keep him out of generosity either.
Do you forget the statement you made? You said that believing that planters irrationally maintained a system that was inefficient for them comes from the same assumption that slavers were benevolent and slaves were grateful.
To falsify that, I don’t need to answer your questions, I only need to show that one can believe that it was an inefficient system for planters and that slavers were not benevolent and the slaves not grateful.
But I will answer some of your questions that are pertinent. The ones which are not pertinent, I will explain why they are not.
These are the non-pertinent questions. Here, we have a very good example of fudging related concepts and coming to erroneous conclusions. Note that the original claim is that slavery is an inefficient system for planters. Efficiency and profitability are different concepts. I can quite well have profitable activities but if there are significant opportunity costs which are greater than their related gains, it is not efficient. So, you can ask if it was profitable all you want, it’s not pertinent because the claim is that it was inefficient for planters, not that it was unprofitable.
Note that the original claim is that it was an inefficient system for the planters.
And yes, I do think that a free wage system is more efficient at allocating labor and provides a better incentive for workers to maximize production and improve their skills. This can quite well be to planters’ interest.
Even Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, argued much the same:
“From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”
http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/slavery2/adamsmith.html
(the page is a student project but the quote is still Smith’s)
Wage labor also provides more incentive for planters to mechanise and generally improve production which ultimately would have been to their benefit.
You pretty much got it, yeah. Although I would not be that libertarian kook. Slavery could have gone on a lot longer.
Smith never visited the Americas, so he would have had third hand knowledge of the economics of slavery at best.
The problem with this argument is that its ultimately an admission that plantation-style slave labor worked out too well. The South didn’t diversify its economy like the North did because the rich guys were profiting well enough from cash crops. The rich guys didn’t have an incentive to stop what worked for them until they had reason to do so (like war), and by the time that happened, Lincoln killed slavery.
We have no reason to believe the South couldn’t have plugged slaves into other rackets and made money off them sweatshop style. That they didn’t suggests they didn’t have an economic incentive do that.
You can’t call something profitable if the costs required outweigh the gains. Doesn’t matter what form those costs take. Everything boils down to money. What “opportunity costs” did slavery impose on slaveowners, anyway?
Was there enough wage laborers in the South in the 18th and 19th centuries to do all the work required to support the operations the typical planter owned? Was there enough laborers to clear the forests, construct the buildings, and drain the swamps so that cities could form there? To even talk about efficiency, you have to presuppose there were plenty of able bodies available to do the work for pay. Like a silly person, you’re comparing the efficiency of slave labor to labor that only existed in theory, because it was absent.
The people who imported Africans to the Americans and enslaved them did so not because there was glut of wage laborers. Just the opposite. They were rational actors that knew if they were to generate the wealth they sought in this country, they would need to force people to work for them.
What is missing here is factual analysis. Smith asserts this based on (lofty) ideals about what drives human behavior. But coercion is amazingly effective in motivating someone to do what they otherwise would not do. To illustrate: right now, there’s no amount of money that would compell me to pick cotton all day in 100 degree Georgia heat. But threaten to whip me, and I would be picking it by the bushel. Do this with a million people and suddenly you have a bunch of people harvesting crops for you that you otherwise would not have, and all you have to do pay someone to occasionally make an example out of one or two of them. That’s not inefficient at all.
Yes, and it said exactly what I concluded – that Cohen is unfamiliar with the work, and knows it only by name and by misleading propaganda gibberish. Again, this is analogous to (correctly) concluding that a creationist who has heard of evolution and picked up a few distorted talking points about it from some Creation Science Bullshit Factory is not, in fact, familiar with evolutionary biology.
Since he have a control group (the industrialized free states of the North) with which to compare, I would say that they answer is “they would have come out more or less the same as the wealthy and politically powerful elites in Yankee country”.