How Libertarians Win Friends And Influence People With Their Positions on the Civil War - Page 154 - Politics and Economics

Max Raker · 01-31-2012, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

If you understand it, why do you (and others) constantly misrepresent my position? Shouldn't it be easy enough to attack what it *actually* is?

To make fun of you?

DblBarrelJ · 01-31-2012, 06:07 PM

I thought this nightmare was locked ages ago.

Sholar · 01-31-2012, 06:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

As we all know, life in the 1870 South for blacks was clearly fantastic. Mr. Former Slaveowner held a wonderful wedding for his daughter and strongest former slave, and everyone was happily ever after.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FlyWf

Ahhh, yes, the piece de resistance of this argument, the inevitable endpoint where we always go when discussing this issue with the decidedly unracist, not-at-all influenced by neoconfederates(Tom just thinks for himself! Not like us sheeple!) libertarian "scholars" of the Ron Paul Revolution:

The blacks were better off under slavery.

.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

They got one form of slavery replaced with another more subtle form of it. It's not the huge victory it's made out to be.

Ending chattel slavery is not a huge victory? Please remind us of that the before you ever make a "liberty"-based argument in any other context.

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlexM

Slavery is disgusting and horrific, but judging individuals based on how they acted within a social structure that you can't understand simply isn't fair.

Seems pretty fair to me. If you don't want to be judged as a slaveholder, don't own slaves.

But hey, slaves should have freed themselves be raising the necessary capital from the markets after negotiating the price of their freedom with their captors. Believing that to be an equitable outcome requires some special thinking in both morality and economics.

Vael · 01-31-2012, 06:59 PM

We need a model of slave pricing to go any further in the economics of slavery imo

The price of a slave is the sum of future expected labour hours, discounted at market rates, which is in part a function of input variables to be chosen by the slave master. Expert slave management has the master choose appropriate values for nutrition and the severity of beatings, prolonging the slave's life and maintaining his productivity so as to maximise current and future profit.

MissileDog · 01-31-2012, 07:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AlexM

So someone who has a small brothel and is disgusted by slavery spends all his money buying a couple slaves because society (both North and South) has created a situation where that's the only way that he can be competitive, and now he has nothing and loses his brothel and his house and has to beg for his dinner? Because he's a slave owner and deserves to be punished?...

ZOMG... and I only did the FYP for grins and giggles... 'farms' is just as horrific.

And libertarians wonder why only about 1% of humanity doesn't reject their anti-human psychotic and sadistic "ideal" in absolute disgust.

But no taxes tho, that's real "slavery"... let me puke.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vael

We need a model of slave pricing to go any further in the economics of slavery imo

The price of a slave is the sum of future expected labour hours, discounted at market rates...

Dude, you forgot salvage value. The ancient Romans used slaves who were too old to work as gladiator practice dummies. Or why not boil down the old and lame, and feed them to the ones who are still able bodied. Saves on gruel costs.

prana · 01-31-2012, 07:01 PM

Call up the GA school board, they may have some word problems.

ILOVEPOKER929 · 01-31-2012, 07:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

They got one form of slavery replaced with another more subtle form of it. It's not the huge victory it's made out to be.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sholar

Ending chattel slavery is not a huge victory? Please remind us of that the before you ever make a "liberty"-based argument in any other context..

Warning: I'm not following this argument closely so I'm not sure what TC meant but there is a sense where his statement is correct. Although I would still agree that ending chattel slavery WAS a huge victory. Anyways, perhaps TC is referring to this history:

Quote:

Guernica: Things are so bad that I wonder: Do you think it's a good idea for the Mexican government to suspend certain guaranteed constitutional rights in Juárez or elsewhere in Mexico until order is restored?

Noam Chomsky: You first have to ask what the Mexican government is trying to do, and that's a little opaque. It looks to some extent as if they're supporting one of the cartels against the other. If that's what they are trying to do, then there is no justification. If they want to stop the drugs, the drug rackets, I think they know how to proceed, and it's not with military action. You have to get to the heart of the matter. Part of the answer was given by the declaration of the three ex-presidents, Zedillo, Cardoso, and Gaviria. They came out with a study about two years ago in which they simply said that criminalizing drugs is just creating the problem, and that in some fashion the drugs should be legalized, like alcohol, and regulated. Then you wouldn't get criminal syndicates. That's part of the issue, but a deeper part is right here in the United States. The drug problem is in the United States, not in Mexico. It's a demand problem and that is to be dealt with here, and it is not being dealt with. It's been shown over and over that prevention and treatment are far more cost effective than police action, out-of-country action, border control, and so on. But the money goes in the other direction and never has an impact. When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use. In fact, they are not even raising drug prices.

So why carry out these policies year after year at great cost if they're having essentially no impact on the stated goal, and if there are other policies which you know would have an impact and are much cheaper, like prevention and treatment? Only two plausible answers to that. All the leaders are collectively insane, which we can rule out, or else they are just pursuing different goals. Abroad, it's a counterinsurgency campaign, cover for counterinsurgency in Colombia. At home, it's a way of getting rid of a superfluous population. There is a very close race/class correlation -- not perfect but close -- and in fact, black males are being removed. If it were in Colombia, they'd call it limpieza social. Here they put them in jails.

Since the drug war started, there's been a very sharp increase in incarceration rates; the U.S.'s incarceration rate is way beyond maybe five, ten times as high as comparable countries, and its target is primarily black males, Hispanic males, some women, some whites -- very disproportionately to the population. After all, think of the history of this country. After the Emancipation Proclamation, there were about 10 years in which blacks were formally sort of free, and then slavery was reintroduced by incarceration. By the 1870s the states had passed laws, and federal government approved them, in which essentially black life was criminalized. If a black man was found standing on a street corner, he could be arrested for vagrancy. If somebody claimed he looked the wrong way at a white woman, he'd be incarcerated for attempted rape. Pretty soon, you had the black male population mostly in jail, and they were a slave labor force. A lot of the American industrial revolution was based on slave labor from leased prisoners in U.S. steel, the mines.

This went on until the Second World War, when there was a need for labor. There was a post-war boom, and during that period black men could begin to integrate into the work force and get a job in an auto plant -- a fairly decent job with wages -- buy a house, send their kids to school, and so on. Well, by the '70s it was over. The economy was being financialized, production was being exported, there was a rust belt developing where the manufacturing jobs were essentially no longer available. So what do you do with the black population? Well, the answer was throw them back in jail under the pretext of the drug war. That's the consequence, and it's pretty well understood. So we have policies that are carried out that have essentially no impact on the stated goal, there are measures available which could have an impact and are not used. The consequences of the policies happen to be significant for power centers -- carry out counterinsurgency operations in Colombia and elsewhere, and you can carry out social cleansing in effect, in a traditional American way.

All this is staring right at you. Try to find it [mentioned] somewhere. I mean you can find bits and pieces. You can find books that talk about incarceration and others that talk about post-reconstruction periods, some others that talk about the drug war, but it's very rare to see them put together.

Source.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moar Chomsky!!!

Slavery did not end with the Civil War, despite the Constitutional Amendments that prohibited it in principle. The war was followed by a decade of partial freedom for African Americans, but by 1877, with the end of Reconstruction, slavery was reconstituted in a new and even more sadistic form, as Black life was effectively criminalized and sentencing was rendered permanent by various means, while brutalizing prison labor provided a large part of the basis not only for agricultural production, as under chattel slavery, but also for the American industrial revolution.

In the past 30 years, a new form of criminalization has been instituted, much of it in the context of the "drug wars," leading to a huge increase in incarceration, mostly targeting minorities. This provided a new supply of prison labor, much of it in violation of international labor conventions. Ever since the first slaves were brought to the colonies, life for African Americans has scarcely escaped the bonds of slavery.

Source.

**goofyballer** · 01-31-2012, 07:14 PM

Wookie, thank you so much for extracting all this, so much gold here

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

They weren't as free as you think. They went from like 1% freedom to maybe 10-15% freedom?

hahaha wow

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

That's where you are wrong. You don't offer a huge price. You offer a price a bit more than the actual value having a slave would be to the owner. They can take it or leave it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brons

So TC, you WOULD have gone to war if they didn't accept your better offer?

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

No.

TC dropping some pretty big pressure bombs on them slaveowners to get them to give up their slaves!

prana · 01-31-2012, 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

They weren't as free as you think. They went from like 1% freedom to maybe 10-15% freedom?

No war was necessary as time would have worked it out and those southerners would have seen the errors in their ways, dropped slavery and given blacks total freedom. They clearly had these things in order by the time the CRA was enacted ~100 years later.

the steam · 01-31-2012, 07:36 PM

Blacks have murdered as many whites since 1950 as died in the civil war.

Huehuecoyotl · 01-31-2012, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by the steam

Blacks have murdered as many whites since 1950 as died in the civil war.

???

Huehuecoyotl · 01-31-2012, 07:51 PM

Hold over from the RP containment thread

Quote:

I didn't say we were innocent. Straw man! Straw man! Only that you think the US was evil because it didn't make a deal.

Quote:

No, the US was stupid. There's a difference. Damn, you did such a good job of understanding my position before. There's a difference between doing something that is just and doing something that is stupid. Ousting Saddam might have been just, but it surely was stupid.

I thought we just had to make some deal at some time and we could have avoided the whole Civil War and recused the North of this terrible aggression it's been perpetrating. Now the deal can't be stupid? I don't even know what this means. I thought we were weighing the suffering of the slaves in prolonged slavery vs the destruction of the Civil War in some kind of utilitarian scale, but now I guess we aren't or something. We now have justice and ( lack of ) stupidity to measure as well.

Later tonight, I'll write a libertarian response that encapulates your summerized beliefs that's positive, constructive, and makes for good PR instead of mindless libertarian/ paleo conservative wondering over the Civil War.

Max Raker · 01-31-2012, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by the steam

Blacks have murdered as many whites since 1950 as died in the civil war.

This isn't true.

DVaut1 · 01-31-2012, 08:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by the steam

Blacks have murdered as many whites since 1950 as died in the civil war.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Huehuecoyotl

???

I think he's trying to show how ungrateful those blacks are, or something? Nice white people spilled blood just for them, and what do the blacks do but go and spill more white people blood! Give em an inch and they take a mile. White people just can't catch a break. Thanks Civil Rights Act.

Sholar · 01-31-2012, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ILOVEPOKER929

Warning: I'm not following this argument closely so I'm not sure what TC meant but there is a sense where his statement is correct. Although I would still agree that ending chattel slavery WAS a huge victory. Anyways, perhaps TC is referring to this history:

He isn't. You know how I know this? Because he made that argument about 1870, a very relevant fact noted in my original post on this matter as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomCollins

As we all know, life in the 1870 South for blacks was clearly fantastic.