How much did the war cost? How were they able to finance that?

Government is responsible for cleaning up messes it created.

The point of purchasing is not to make slave owners feel happy, but in the interests of those who are against slavery.

I'll never understand the Southern "pride" in the Confederacy. Not just because they turned traitor and started the Civil War so they could continue owning slaves, which is morally awful, but they ended up losing that war. How is that something to be proud of?

Like changing South Carolina's flag was a big deal, and the South is littered with statues of Confederate generals... why are rednecks so proud of their heritage of getting their asses kicked?

Ever heard of wartime economies?

And LOL the govt. is responsible for insubordinate members?

Can we just merge this into the "How Libertarians..." thread so everyone can laugh at TomCollins for never telling Case Closed and me why he thinks the South fired first from the last time we had this exact thread a few months ago?

well, I don't think the argument that it would be too much of a fiscal burden on the North is a very good argument given that there was a far greater fiscal burden in the war, and the extremely expensive loss of life (not to mention ill will between the North and South spent to this day). in the REAL WORLD, you choose between alternatives.

How much did the Civil War cost?

Yes, they are responsible when they make it legal and it is impossible to compete without using slavery.

the op is painfully bad. forget the primary costs of the war (guns, food, ammo), in what economic world do you live in where 100m would be cheaper than losing 700,000 people and all of their future productivity?

The notion that the South would simply have accepted a lump sum payment for their slaves and agreed to end the practice is historically dubious in the extreme, at best. Slavery was far more than an economic quirk of the South. It was a plank in cultural white supremacy that served a political purpose and marked status with society as well. The Southern aristocracy was largely convinced that slavery was at worst a necessary evil, and at best fundamental to the way they styled themselves.

If it was simply a matter of buying them off, obviously this would be preferable. But it's incredibly naive to think this was a viable option.

I know you have a hard time with this, but in "the real world" things are complicated. Not everything is "good guys" vs "bad guys" and criticizing Team X doesn't mean you're a fan of Team Y.

Real or nomimal cost?

And I am sorry, but they did make not slavery legal. Who made slavery? Well, that was the Founding Fathers. Not the congress circa 1860..

WWII: commies vs. nazis. PICK A SIDE!

As long as we're here discussing overthrowing morally bankrupt regimes, who's up for invading Iran and North Korea?

True, but I see the "why didn't the North just buy and free all the slaves?" argument a lot, but I never see the "why didn't the Allies just pay Hitler to stop gassing Jews?" argument, even though I see them as functionally equivalent.

Doesn't matter that Congress in 1860 didn't do it, they represent the same organization that did.

Did Hitler gas the Jews for economic reasons? If so, then maybe it would have been a good idea. It depends if you are more motivated by punishing evil rather than minimizing cost and stopping evil.

To trace TomCollins' logic here:

In 1790, Southerners demanded that the federal government recognize slavery. Northerners compromise with them and agree to not ban importation of slavery, count slaves as 3/5ths of a person for voting, etc.

In 1860, Southerners deserved money from the federal government to stop using their slaves. Because in 1790 Northern abolitionists compromised with them.

Come on dude, you're twisting history.

Sorry, but how many lives were lost during WWII? And measure that against "future productivity" versus productivity during WWII...

Your logic is invalid.

Govt didnt create slavery. "The market" created slavery. Men rounded up black people and sold them to other men, and made a good buck in the process and did more of it. I know its the cool kid thing to do to blame every world problem on "govt" but you should just change that to "humanity". Humanity made a mess of slavery. Humanity had to clean it up. It did. Bloodily. But that doesn't fit your bumper sticker world view.

I'd imagine that in Ron Paul's REAL WORLD, Neo from The Matrix walked up to Lincoln and said "If you take the Blue Pill, you wake up in your bed in 2012 and believe an oversimplified revisionist version of history where, for a simple one-time price, slavery was ended and the big bad federal government couldn't stop you from seceding regardless of how many African-Americans were denied their constitutional right to participate in the governmental process that brought these decisions on in the first place. But if you take the Red Pill, you'll see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and scour the country and kill 600,000 people, and you will have to answer to the millions of slave owners that harbor resentment because they didn't get a cash refund on the human beings they owned."

And some of the people who enslaved africans were fellow africans. In countries without any strong centralized government. Ironic. No?

Well, I am not going to go to bat for the Nazis.

The sad part is, the U.S. and other countries could have saved a lot of Jewish people, possibly most of them, without having to pay Hitler anything. USA#1

But like, when you lie about history, when you pretend the North started the war, that is picking a side.

If you were real real real on the ball about pointing out that if the Soviets had just given the rest of Poland to Hitler he might not have invaded, people might see that as being unduly sympathetic to Nazism.

If you worked that in with say, believing a whole lot of factually incorrect things whose intellectual foundations can be traced back to a collection of .pdfs and blog posts that are pretty much exclusively published by a Neo-Nazi think tank...