It's not about favoring. It's about trying to change social norms most effectively.

The ideal solution frees the slaves right away while keeping Southerners from thinking they are being harmed. This allows them to save face, be able to replace their slave-based economy with something far more acceptable, and life goes on. Forcing the issue potentially causes much worse situations that are harder to resolve. This is evident by anyone who has been to the South 150 years after the outbreak of the war. It's not the slaveowners that were some isolated problem, it was the entire culture that was the problem. The question comes down to how do you solve that? When you let things happen more gradually and naturally, you'll tend to end up with better results (at least in my opinion).

Which is why the purchasing option seems to maximize the benefits to the slaves (they get freed fastest), minimizes conflict, and spreads the cost evenly based on the entire state which is responsible for the condition of slavery to begin with. It has nothing to do with caring deeply about the slaveowners. It has to do with taking a strategy that is unlikely to change hearts and minds and instigate a huge conflict that perpetuates nearly 2 centuries later.

Killing all the slaves would be worse. Killing a bunch of other random innocents to get them freed a few years early would be worse. There are a lot of things worse.

Put it this way. Say we could have freed the slaves 1 day earlier than we did, but it would have meant killing 10 million innocent people. Would this be worth it?

Yes, I do think slaves are animals. So are slaveowners, regular freemen, etc... All people are animals. And yes, they are people, and deserve freedom. Which is why if you are responsible for setting up the system for having them enslaved, you should bear the costs for it.

Just pointing out where this line of discussion came from and where I was personally arguing from.

Win arguments? No one wins an argument on the internet. We just **** around for fun. Liberal wins elections imo. Libertarians win consolation prizes.

Better for whom?

If you try to reconcile that with history, what happens?

The slaveholder and slave aren't in symmetrical positions, where we need to "spread the cost evenly" between the two.

Future generations mostly. But should help people in the present time as well.

It simply shows that implementation failed with the actions taken. We forced an animal into a corner and for some reason it didn't want to have a reasonable discussion. It worked in numerous other cultures, but didn't work here due to the nature of politics at the time. Rather than backing off and trying to mend things, there was very much a confrontational position that occurred due to power struggles for other reasons as well. That in no way says that good faith negotiations were impossible to ever happen. Looking at history, it's easy to see how poor of the results we got. That in no way means it wasn't possible to do better through other means.

I'm not spreading it between the slaveholder and the slave. I'm spreading it among the government that allowed slavery for a century.

Youz guyz literally have no idea what racism is. AFAIK it just means "buttface" to youz guyz... just a meaningless random sticks-and-stones word. This whole LOLtastical and very predictable response is just... "well so are you!".

Do you want to double down on your LOLZ ITT and explain why you randomly called someone else a racist? You do realize that real human beings remain enslaved while this "gradual" strategy to continue enriching the slave owners plays out for a few centuries.

And this really has to be one of those LOLtastical "libertarian" paradoxes, like with regulation is the root cause of people doing the bad regulated things, and the way to get people not to do them is not regulating them...

So getting rid of slavery is the root cause of racism. WAT?

Denying enslaved people their freedom should help them?

The slaveholders were the ones adopting the confrontational position.

Setting aside whether that makes sense, why is that an important goal?

Getting rid of slavery *the way we did* is a root cause not only of racism today, but the culture of the South we have today. It all comes down to the means that were used, not the ends. There were ways to end slavery without causing the problems that the Civil War caused today.

Have you ever lived in the South? Are you even from the US?

This was, remarkably, already argued earlier in this thread. I can't remember by whom, so it's possible it was TomCollins then, too, but I don't think so.

Lizard Men spotted ITT. LOL, that's why ILYG;;DEC!

It could. If your free years (which are fewer) are greater, then you still could be better off. But there's a chance that you have some people worse off because of it, and a lot of people (future generations) better off. For example, if you had to be enslaved an extra year, but the KKK never exists, would you be better off?

Not according to customs at the times. It's easy to look back now and think otherwise. In 100 years, we could be saying the same thing about either pro or anti-abortion advocates.

Stability, ability to move forward without conflict, changing hearts and minds is easier. People are much more reasonable when you don't "threaten" their livelihood. It makes it a lot easier to change your ways when you don't feel like someone is out to screw you.

Since I didn't even argue it in this thread (just MissileDog's MissileDogish interpretation of my words), I doubt it.

But if you actually owned slaves, you should receive a fair market price for your property?

Tom, at any point are you going to consider the possibility that the people who taught you this horrifying neoconfederate horse**** weren't the principled libertarian pacificists they claimed to be?

LOL no dude, I live at the beach in SoCal. I've visited the south. But moving right along...

I guess we can look at other places in the world were the taxpayers were forced to pay off the slave owners... are you sure there is no racism there now-a-days? Or how about the northern or western USA#1... is there no culture of racism in these areas either? And how about, say, Latinos or Native Americans in the USA#1, is there no racism towards these folks? LOL no. By the 1860s slavery was not considered "OK". The USA#1 was the last holdout of major capitalistic slavery. And that was considered an terrible thing in the western world. The USA#1 was considered a reprehensible barbaric and rouge regime for exactly this reason.

ABSOLUTE MORAL RELATIVISM. Also you're wrong(I know, I was as surprised as you! Then I remembered that instead of learning about this from history books you appear to have made it up off the top of your head during this thread based on what you think sounds plausible and also makes Ron Paul be right), by the time of the American Civil War slavery had been abolished throughout the British Empire generations ago and was regarded by at least some Americans as being a reprehensible evil.

Tom, would it be fair to say that FDR's biggest foreign policy error was that he did not try to change the social norms in Nazi Germany regarding gassing Jews to death?

Well maybe his overaggressive attempts to force his "don't massacre Chinese civilians" view on the Japanese is right up there. I suspect that has lead to hard feelings to this day.

The problem with this hypothetical is that is wasn't at all obvious in the 1860s that slavery was going to go away in a few years.

"Give Me Liberty Or I'll Ask Again In a Little Bit"!

What makes you think I was taught this? You keep claiming this, but of course it isn't true. Some of us know how to think for ourselves. I have read maybe 2-3 articles on mises tops, or any other "neoconfederate" site you may claim.

If you could get the slaves away from the slaveowners, and everything else was dandy in the South, I'd be totally fine with screwing the slaveowners. Even if they get harmed for not complying voluntarily, totally cool with me. The problem is with the social norms at the time, and trying to get them to change and taking the best approach.

Just as I don't think going around and murdering public officials who encourage things I find terrible today (but not as bad as slavery) is an effective way to change peoples hearts and minds, the same thing applies to slavery. Which is why the voluntary solution does a good job of letting it end quickly without causing a great deal of harm to innocents in the process.

The government could have sold off land to raise the money. I doubt there would be no racism today. There would be less, though. There is a lot less racism in some parts of the country than others. Why do you think that is? You have literally no knowledge of Southern culture and the anti-outsider perspective they have and how terrible it is.

Yes, the USA was behind a lot of the rest of the world, as it tends to be on some issues. People say the same thing about the death penalty today. Things take longer sometimes in some places.

Sure, there was a huge abolishonist movement. But it was far from widely accepted at the time, however it was growing. Your understanding of my knowledge of US History is quite laughable (AP US History scores for rollz?), along with the college courses I took in it (fairly in depth), along with reading various sources (which doesn't include being "taught" by someone) along the way. You are a huge joke when you resort to these ad hominems which are hilariously wrong and ignorant. But you have nothing else, so I'm not shocked. You just assume anyone who disagrees with you is some dimwitted fool.

Actually it goes back to the dumbass Treaty of Versailles that basically got us into the mess.

I'm sorry, I don't subscribe to that high school myth. The Constitution was an elitist document, that "represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders" specifically designed "to limit the ability" of a functioning democracy from ever developing. IOW, the constitution was never about limiting the power of the haves, it was about limiting the power of the have-nots.

The constitution was constructed to "protect the minority of the opulent from the majority"(James Madison), i.e. to protect "the wealth of the nation,"(James Madison), the "more capable set of men,"(James Madison) from "the [non-propertied] proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings"(James Madison), because after all, those "without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,"(James Madison acknowledging the danger of a real functioning democracy). So the constitution was specifically designed to make sure that "those who own the country [get] to govern it"(founding father John Jay) and to keep the "great beast"(Alexander Hamilton's phrase for the general population) caged in by "check[ing] the imprudence of democracy"(Alexander Hamilton's phrase for an actual functioning democracy where policy comports to the will of the "great beast").

ZOMG lol...moar pleaze moar..!!!

these are my most favorite threads. I never laughed so hard on this site as when I read that How Win Friends And Influence People With Their Positions on the Civil War thread...that was the Gold Standard of Libertarian contortionism, distortionism, and revisionism. Pure comedy gold.

In fact, that HLWFAIPWTPOTCW thread is still set as my homepage for 2+2 cuz I read the whole thread over a few days a while back.

LOL...MOAR!!!!!!!!

What I find truly LOLZ ITT is that not one Ronulan has jumped in and claimed that L.Ron does not basically agree with TomCollins. Not even one. InB4...