I’m Not The Only One

Okay, it ALMOST ended slavery in the U.S., but I figured a title like that would be more eye-catching.

I know the whole Rand Paul story is old news, but the unfortunate byproduct of that story is that many people are claiming that only government could’ve killed Jim Crow and ended slavery and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, private businesses would still be excluding minorities today.  This conclusion couldn’t be more moronic and requires a profound ignorance in both history and economics.

Let’s start with slavery in the United States, the only country in the world to have a civil war to end slavery.  Why the U.S. needed a civil war to end slavery is confusing, because it probably would’ve been cheaper for President Lincoln to simply purchase every slave in the South and set them free.  The concept of the U.S. government being the only thing that could’ve ended slavery is a joke because the government was the only thing keeping slavery alive in the U.S.  Instead of recognizing that slavery is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, slavery was allowed in the South on the justification of states’ rights, even though no state is allowed to violate the Constitution.  The other factor that kept slavery alive were the fugitive slave laws in which the federal government spent money to catch and detain runaway slaves (even if the runaways had made it to the “free” states) and return them to their owners.

There are several private sector factors that explain not only why slavery gradually went into decline throughout the United States, but also why it would’ve ended with or without the Civil War.  For instance,  in 1873, when Spain abolished slavery in its two remaining colonies in the Americas, Cuba and Puerto Rico, free blacks already outnumbered slaves because many former slave owners in these colonies agreed that free men worked harder than slaves because they had a vested interest in their productivity whereas a slave, no matter how hard he worked, was still someone else’s property and the fruits of his productivity would all go to benefit the master.  Spanish slave owners also recognized the legal liability of slave ownership in which they would be held legally responsible for any property damage committed by their slaves as opposed to a non-slave laborer. There was no civil war to free slaves, simply a royal decree.

Another factor that signaled the beginning of the end of slavery in the U.S. was the end of the importation of new slaves from west Africa, enforced by the British Navy.  The U.S. fought Britain in 1812 for the right to bring slaves from Africa and was defeated.  Another reason was the development of technology.  It’s no coincidence that slavery was abolished in the U.S. states with Americans who were also the earliest to adopt new technology.  Humans, free or enslaved, cannot possibly compete with machines in most areas of production (On a side note, more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have been lost to machines than have been outsourced to other countries.  Maybe Lou Dobbs should call for a boycott on job-stealing robots!).  This increase of production is also why the North defeated the South in the Civil War.  Slavery only makes sense in a society where more productive technology does not exist.  While the non-slave holding states continued to develop their technology, the south remained in the 1700s, holding strong to its agricultural economy.

So let’s break it down:

Reasons why the Free Market made slavery unpopular:

• Free men work harder than slaves
• Machines work harder than men
• Liability issues of owning human beings and being responsible for another person’s actions or the actions of hundreds or even thousands of human beings

Reason why the Free market did not end slavery:

• Government legalized slaver, a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution
• Government legalized the importation of African slaves until 1812 when British aggression  made it impossible
• Fugitive slave laws returned runaway slaves to their masters

In my next blog entry I will explain how the Free Market thwarted discrimination well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Media, Government Incompetence, History, Government Corruption, Economics, Civil Rights, Government Interference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.