Antiboyscout wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 2:26 amThe economic collapse of the south
the adoption of sharecropping that people like you accuse of being defacto slavery
the fact that sharecropping didn't end until the invention of the mechanical cotton picker nearly a century later. Meaning the problem wasn't actually solved until then.
Having a climate that makes mechanized farming, like in the north, impossible it draws one toward slavery as there are no alternatives. Means to an end, not an end of itself.
Considering the mechanical cotton picker was so widely adopted after it's introduction that it is one of the main causes of the second great migration, it seems those southerners were perfectly willing to use an alternative when it presented itself.
it was a matter of survival
a modern equivalence would be if NYC passed a law banning the ownership of internal combustion engines in the entire state. Easy enough for the city slickers who can walk and drive electric. Not so easy for the farmer up-state who must scrap his tractor and combine and semi. If NYC offered no alternative, exemption, or timetable to ween off the use of the tractor it would look like a naked power grab of the urban cities weakening rural economies for their own benefit.
So your justification is that slavery was "the only viable economic solution". Which is total and complete horseshit. Slavery is economically inefficient. From an economists perspective, and setting aside the morality, you have to devote extra labor to having overseers who do nothing but try to keep slaves in line. With paid workers, they keep themselves in line since, y'know, they're getting paid. Similarly slaves still require food, clothing, housing, all the essentials. And finally, slaves have no incentive to work any harder than they need to to avoid beatings. Since they don't profit from their labor, they don't have any incentive to work harder than the bare minimum.
So from an economic perspective as well as a moral one, slavery is a dismal failure. All it does is result in less wealth, less innovation, and concentrating that wealth into a small number of hands who use it inefficiently. With no economic freedom or mobility, the free market literally cannot exist (see the word FREE in free market) - slavery is basically communism where the output of the communist system is used for enriching the wealthy, rather than the people (so, communism but with more beatings).
https://fee.org/articles/slavery-was-never-economically-efficient/
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-25/how-slavery-hurt-the-u-s-economy
https://mises.org/wire/left-argues-slavery-was-economic-blessing-heres-why-they-are-wrong
These are three
conservative sources condemning slavery as economically inefficient. Each of them is on the right wing of the American political spectrum - in case of Mises, on the bleeding crazy edge of the far right where they can't help but choose breakfast cereals on the basis of which one pwns the libtards. And they all disagree with you.
Mmm, maybe you should have paid more attention in school and less attention to crazy shit fed to you from "alternative education".
