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> A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that? A large population of (deliberately kept) illiterate, uneducated people who hate their oppressors is a disadvantage to society, not an advantage. It is low-trust culture distilled to its extreme. A society like that is incapable of innovating or adapting, so it ends up leaning heavily on resource extraction. The cash crops of the South became a weak point that the Unionists exploited to their advantage in the Civil War - when the fields were razed and the shipments were blockaded, it became impossible for the Confederates to continue funding their rebellion. > I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance. It is not enough for a society to merely keep its people alive. The other levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are also important, or else your society will be unable to sustain itself, partially for the reasons I outlined above. > Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise. Underlying this flawed argument is the idea that a person cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about what clothes to buy, or what house to live in, or what food to eat. Why should I trust your, or anyone else's, judgment on which people to empower with self-agency? Surely you don't need to be reminded that the colonies revolted against the British for much less egregious violations of that agency? > So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions. Reaching this conclusion requires a naive ignorance of the second-order detriments of institutional slavery in a society, not to mention an utter rejection of basic free market principles. The ability of participants to choose what to do and how to spend is a good thing for an economy. |
But no, you have come to some very hasty and incorrect conclusions about my beliefs. I do not believe that "people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions". In the hierarchy of needs, when a person's food, clothing, and shelter are already provided and they do not need to worry about these utterly basic needs, then they are going to function better. A freed worker must not only pay for all of these basic needs out of their own wages, but must also make all the relevant household decisions, trips to the store, and maintenance, that is a crazy mental and physical load, just to provide for their basic needs. Yes, that is the cost of freedom. I am just saying, that freedom's costs should be acknowledged, along with its responsibilities.
And you say that I'm naïvely ignorant for reaching "conclusions". I don't think I've reached any conclusions. I've simply contemplated the situation more deeply than I previously did. Is that wrongthink? I should not need to apologize for discerning and discussing more nuance than most people are willing to do.