The same conclusions were drawn at the time with the benefit of firsthand knowledge (see e.g. Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It):
Again, your original statement was that believing slavery was an inefficient system for the planters comes from the assumption that the slaveowners were benevolent and the slaves grateful. Do you still maintain that?
Instead of looking up a term you didn’t understand (that of opportunity cost), you just preferred to keep on and not try to understand the opposing argument, right? Look up that concept and reread what I said. There’s no point to listing the opportunity costs of slavery if you insist on not knowing what the concept of opportunity cost means.
I don’t know anymore than you if there were enough people but I do know that the US had a lot of immigration in the 19th century. I don’t need to know if because all I’m required to show is that it’s possible to believe that slavery was inefficient for the planters without thinking that the slaveowners were benevolent and the slaves grateful. Really, I don’t need to show anything more than that to show that your earlier reply to Steve MB is nonsense; it’s perfectly possible to believe it was an inefficient system for planters without thinking that slaveowners were benevolent or slaves grateful and it doesn’t prevent thinking of slavery as an atrocity.
Fair’s fair : the North also got kickstarted with slavery (and indentured servitude). They managed to move past it to some extent, but it’s disingenuous to say slavery didn’t exist in the North.
Actually, interesting question : because of the whole “kick out the British and their Empire’s infrastructure” thing, the fledgling Colonies had to become self-sufficient in a big, relatively unplanned hurry. Could that have been achieved at all, were it not for the bloody cotton fields, the cash crops, the cheap manual labour ?
The North practiced for a period of time too, so it’s not a control group. But let’s put that aside.
Who is “they”? I’m arguing that individual slaveowners profited from slavery. Saying they were harmed is laughable (and offensive) when the institution is what allowed them to live in mansions, hold political office, and send their kids off to elite schools. We have no reason to believe anyone who amassed a fortune from the sordid affair would have done better in the absence of slavery.
In fact, it is the assumption that they would have come out on top regardless that I find disturbing, as it totally misses the reason why slavery existed and why it took a war to abolish it.
I know very well what opportunity costs are, sweetie pie. You have yet to show that you do, because you refuse to explain how such costs impacted slaveowners.
Did it have enough to support the plantations and create the infrastructure that made the ruling class wealthy? If you don’t know the answer to this question, then you need to stop treating wage labor as a practical alternative, as it just makes you look like a raging buffoon.
Are you special or something? Because you keep repeating this sentiment like Rain Man.
Slavery harmed slaveowners in the same way that a wife-beater harms himself. Maybe if he wasn’t so busy beating his wife, he’d have more time to learn a foreign language, become the next Bill Gates, or invent the cure for cancer. There are real opportunity costs to beating one’s wife all day. Plus, all that punching does a number on the knuckles.
I don’t know why it’s really worth talking about all his “pain”, though. It’s negligible compared to that suffered by his wife. They don’t even belong in the same universe, let alone the same sentence.
If everyone knows that slavery is harmful for all parties involved, I wonder why it still exists? Why do big box stores exist, when everyone knows “mutually harmful” sweatshops are churning out all those low, low prices?
I’ve read a bunch of conservative opinion pieces on de Blasio. Not one mentioned anything about his family.
They instead objected to his positions on crime, taxes and “school choice”.
If Cohen is bigoted, it’s for feeding the stereotype that right-wingers are primarily motivated by bigotry.
Slavery harmed slaveowners the same say the illegal drug trade hurts the Nino Browns of the world, the same way our current healthcare system harms billionaire insurance execs, and the same way undocumented workers harm the California fruit industry.
Which is to say, no true harm unless we’re using “harm” in a gratuitous fashion.
He’s kept around because of his style, not in spite of it. He outrages people, they start message board threads or blogs about him, and the post’s page views go up. It’s a feature, not a bug.
There were a number of reasonable op-eds published in the post on 11/11. This is the one people are talking about.
It’s my understanding that the position expressed here isn’t that far away from the conventional wisdom among US historians c. 1949. The argument was that slavery was destined for economic failure.
It’s a business, a competitive one. So there were plenty of failures. And plenty of businesses near the borderline. Slaver businesses sell their assets to stay above water, which means breaking up families.
Coates of the Atlantic has read a few accounts of escaped slaves. Most (not all) were guys in their 20s IIRC. What motivated them most? It wasn’t that they were having their labor stolen. No, they didn’t like the threat of having their loved ones torn from them. That’s what spurred them to risk limb and life and somehow connive their way towards the north, without job waiting and without easily marketable skills.
Anyway, the thinking among historians c. 1949 wasn’t wholly absurd, though it was ignorant of economics. The slavers owned assets, ones they borrowed money for. If farm prices collapsed, they might not be able to make interest payments. So you could see business failures. And slaves put on the market. And a subsequent fall in the price of slaves, which in turn makes the business viable for other planters. It’s only when the price of slaves drops to zero that the institution becomes non-viable. And there is no evidence that anything like that happened. So yes, slavery was wholly viable as an institution and some slave plantations failed. There’s no contradiction there. AFAIK, this argument was first made during the 1950s.
There are also historians who argue otherwise. The institution was around for 3 centuries and hadn’t showed any signs of slowing down even when the war started. Far from it, in fact, with westward expansion opening up all kinds of doors. What’s obvious is that the cash crop industry was becoming less profitable, but the slaves themselves never stopped being a good investment. They could be plugged into mines, factories, and construction sites.
If you conflate slaves with agribusiness, then of course it makes sense to so say it was destined for economic failure. But the very fact that companies today use low-wage exploitative labor (sweatshops, illegal aliens, etc.) makes it hard for me to accept the idea that slavery would have died out naturally.
This doesn’t answer my question, though. I’ll put it another way.
The California fruit industry employs undocumented workers and pays them peanuts relative to the minimum wage. If they stopped using these workers and decided to recruit citizens, do you think they will become more or less profitable? Is it less efficient to use dirt cheap labor that can be greatly exploited due to the absence of worker protections, or is it more efficient?
The economic conditions that made slavery work in the South are no different than the conditions that drive agribusiness today.
But the point is that if slavers used wage labor instead of slaves, they would have been worse off than those who used slaves. Because when farm price collapsed, at least the slavers could sell off their slaves and recoup losses. Or they could rent the slaves out to other people. The planter who hires his field hands can’t do that, so he is shit out of luck.
Yes, business can always fail. That’s not debateable. What I’m arguing is that to these wealth-seeking captalists, slave labor was superior to wage labor, and that was why they damn near blew up the country trying to keep it. It was efficient in the sense that they could force as many people as they wanted to work for them rather than sit around waiting for a poor white to apply for a position, and they could extract as much labor out of them as was physically possible without losing anything in payroll.
To return us to the topic that this present discussion spun off from: I can’t blame Cohen for being ignorant of slavery and what it represented, because I don’t think he is all that unique. We all have blind spots on this topic, for some reason. He was just crazy enough to admit it.
What this argument over how slave owners were harmed by slavery actually does is expose one of the major flaws of capitalism. Namely that rational small-scale decisions made to maximize profit can often lead to undesirable large-scale outcomes. In other words, Smith’s invisible hand is a crock of shit.
Slavery was always an extremely profitable way to farm in the South. We know this because of how widespread it was. If the big planters could have made more money by paying their workers instead of paying to hold workers as prisoners, market forces would have eventually driven slavery into extinction. It survived as an institution because it worked so well.
Of course, in the long run an abundance of cheap, uneducated labor meant that the South never experienced much pressure to industrialize and lacked the sort of workers that would have made industrialization possible. So in that sense the slave owners were “harmed” by it. But right up until the industrial North put an end to their vile institution they weren’t harmed at all. They were living lives of wealth and ease. If the North hadn’t invaded there’s not reason to think that slavery as an institution ever would have withered away of its own accord.
So, of course Adam Smith would maintain that slavery was inefficient on the small scale, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s small-scale efficiency actually blows an enormous hole in his economic theory.
For example, pretty much every serious economic historian of the era active today AFAIK. Slavery could only be nonviable if the price of slave dropped to zero. That didn’t happen. The idea that slavery would have collapsed of its own accord is bunk. Historians c. 1949 were confused, though their views persisted into some 1970s textbooks.
As an aside, here’s Adam Smith’s chapter entitled *Of the Wages of Labour *. I think the student vastly overstates Smith’s argument. Smith mentioned “Slave” a total of 7 times in the chapter and nowhere speculated about the institution’s persistence. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - Econlib
Someone explain to Mr Cohen that “avant-garde” is meant to move into the mainstream in time, not just sit there slowly Zeerusting.
Also, with a name like Cohen, he’s either a Yid or a Mick who can’t spell, so my WASP gullet is gagging at his presumption of speaking for any cultural conservatism in this here English colony. 
Pretty sure Rashida Jones, Halle Berry, and Tiger Woods did a lot to sell the idea that mixed-race offspring are cute and desirable. Heck, one’s in the White House!
Yes. That’s what people like Richard Cohen really take issue with ;).
On the contrary, they couldn’t diversify. They didn’t dare let slaves learn to read much less anything more sophisticated than that; they were too terrified of slave rebellions. Nor could they compete industrially even if they tried using slave labor because slaves do shoddy work. And that’s assuming the slaves don’t start actively indulging in sabotage once they have access to things worth sabotaging and the tools & skills to do so.
Even more importantly as is common among slaver/aristocratic cultures practical work became associated with the subjugated class, and therefore was beneath the dignity of the educated class. They couldn’t industrialize because that would require the slaver class to do actual work, which they couldn’t bring themselves to do as a result of slavery.
Certainly. Slavery is less efficient than free labor, not more so; logically, they would have become self sufficient faster not slower without slavery. Slavery is a drag on society*, it doesn’t “kickstart” anything. What slavery does do is enrich a small minority at the expense of the wealth and freedom of the rest of the population.
*And keep in mind that “society” includes everybody, including the slaves. Refusing to count the slaves as part of society makes slavery look far more efficient and profitable than it actually is for a society.
Slavery also twisted them psychologically, socially and politically due to the need to justify and maintain it. And ultimately led to the civil war; to continue with your wife beater analogy, beating your wife stops looking like a good idea when it gets you shot in the face or hauled off to prison. The South is still paying the price for slavery, and to a lesser degree so is the rest of the US.
For one thing as we see in this thread, it’s pretty much an article of faith among many people that ruthless exploitation is more profitable and efficient. If a company makes more profit by treating its customers and employees well it will seldom be imitated because it is beyond the capability of their competitors to believe that that good treatment is why they are doing well.
No they couldn’t have, because do so would have meant giving them the education and tools needed for a serious rebellion. As in fact was demonstrated by all the violent labor uprisings later on.
I disagree. They had spent generations exploiting and brutalizing people while convincing themselves that it was right and just and natural. Regardless of profitability it was psychologically impossible for most of them to give up on slavery because doing so would mean that they were wrong, they’d always been wrong, and that all of their cruelty and brutality were acts of unmitigated evil and stupidity. They had to believe that slavery was good and necessary; they’d invested too much in that idea psychologically to believe otherwise. No one wants to admit that they & their ancestors are all both stupid and monsters. They turned their entire culture into a huge psychological/political defense mechanism for slavery, in part because doing otherwise would mean admitting the truth.
And as evidence for my position consider how even now people try to justify slavery as having been necessary or inevitable or anything else than the act of evil & stupidity that it was. People are still trying to rationalize the guilt away.
Evidence2: Almost immediately after surrender Southern apologists began claiming that the US Civil War was not about slavery, but rather state rights. According to another poster on this board, some of them even convinced themselves of this. But you only need to look at the Mississippi Declaration of Secession to show this view is bunk, though it remains popular to the present day.
A few more points
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Incidentally though, exploitation of slave labor arguably propped northern industrialization, to the extent that exported cotton provided foreign currency for imported machinery. That’s the only mechanism I can think of anyway. We’re not discussing necessary or sufficient conditions here.
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Also, another way slavery repressed Southern economic development was that its culture of racism discouraged immigration from foreign lands.
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Slavery is well matched for activities that can be done with gang labor. Low skills is one aspect but the key one ease of monitoring. So it works in large scale plantations, small scale farms and a few other tasks like dragging boats up a river, or manning the oars in ancient ocean vessels. It’s harder to closely monitor workers in an industrial context. Measuring work effort is one aspect, but so is measuring outright sabotage: this remains a concern to the present day.