SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument

As a followup to yesterday’s post about New Jersey’s flirtation with racial reparations, there is one more thing in the article I want to comment on. It is an argument advanced to bolster the case for reparations that deserves to be separately called out because it is so egregious and is pregnant with horrific implications. From Reparations, and the dark Jersey history Trenton is scared to discuss:

“[New Jersey] was a very sympathetic state to Southern slavery,” says Stephanie Wilson, executive director of the state’s Amistad Commission, which advises schools on curriculum. “Slavery was in almost every town and enclave. It’s a hidden and unspoken piece of our history that was central to building our economy.” [My emphasis]

The idea that  “Slavery . . . was central to building our economy.” is one of the vilest, and false, statements ever uttered. It implies that slavery is good economically. This is a version of one of the old Confederate arguments in defense of slavery, King Cotton, a false theory which held that the American and world economies were built on cotton slave plantations and would collapse if the North won the Civil War and abolished slavery.

Prosperous economies are built by free people working, innovating, and trading voluntarily, each in pursuit of his own self-interest. Slavery has existed throughout history on every continent among every people. Yet The Great Enrichment of the past 250 years only happened under the rise of Enlightenment-spawned Capitalism, the social system of universal, equal, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why? Because prosperity happens only to the extent that the common person was liberated under the rights-protecting constitutional republican government to speak, believe, associate, trade, and innovate. 

Slaves enjoy none of those freedoms. They are, by definition, not self-owning and self-governing. They therefore cannot live freely by their own judgment to participate and contribute to the free market economy. George Washington Carver, the great agricultural innovator, achieved his success as a free man, not as a slave. The period of greatest economic progress in America was The Inventive Period between the end of the Civil War, when slaves were freed, until World War I—the freeist period in world history. There would have been no George Washington Carver, or other great black innovators who flourished as free people, if African-Americans had remained enslaved. Indeed, America’s great black innovators and entrepreneurs flourished under Capitalistic freedom, not communistic slavery. How many would-be highly productive black people—how many George Washington Carvers—were held back in slavery, robbed of their freedom to think, learn, and act, thus diminishing, not building, our economy by robbing us of their entrepreneurial benefits? 

America is worse off, not better off, because of slavery. Slaves were forbidden from attaining even a minimal education. Was America’s economic might built on ignorance, or intelligence—by muscles or minds? Are we are to believe that the minimal contribution of muscular slave labor “was central to building our economy?” Free minds and free markets, to the extent people were free to enjoy them, had nothing to do with it?

Slavery “central to building our economy?” BULLSHIT On steroids!! If that were true, human history would have been one long economic boom, because slavery had existed on every continent but Antarctica, among all people and races, prior to The Enlightenment and America. The Great Enrichment didn’t start in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in the colonies by British slave traders. It began at the end of 18th Century, when the Declaration of Independence was signed and America was born. It is Capitalistic individual freedom that is central to our, or any, flourishing economy. Slavery is central only to economic stagnation, as the history of the world clearly demonstrates. 

It’s absolutely disgusting that there are still people pushing the false neo-Confederate argument that slavery is good for the economy. That an educator who “advises schools on curriculum” is behind this argument is just another example of the ideological corruption that permeates American schools. Are reparations advocates so desperate to justify their cause as to actually advance the idea that slavery builds vibrant economies? Disgraceful.

But is that the whole story? Is reparations the ultimate goal of this theory of economic power? Given that the “slavery is good economics” argument is easily refuted as an economic fairy tail, could there be some deeper motive? One must ask, what social system gains the most intellectual backing from the claim? Certainly not Capitalism, the manifestation of a free society and individual rights. Confederate slavocrats certainly knew. They hated Capitalism, explicitly and unequivocally. Anti-Calitalist, pro-slavery intellectual George Fitzhugh explicitly proclaimed “The Failure Of A Free Society” in 1854.

It’s an argument that only socialists, and slaveholders, could love. And that’s what I meant by “pregnant with horrific implications.” Fitzhugh gushed that “Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” Those “cares” include concerns about food, clothing, shelter, medical care, a job, and so on. Those cares were, in theory, relieved by their masters. Isn’t this what socialism, including Bernie Sanders style “democratic socialism”, promises to everyone, with the state in place of the plantation master? How else does one set America up to become one big socialist slave plantation, if not by claiming that slavery is the foundation of the economy? We’d all be equally better off as slaves under socialist masters, whether their names are Bernie Sanders or Nicolás Maduro.

There, in a nutshell, is the motive behind anyone who claims that slavery is “central to building our economy,” or any economy. Reparations is a cover. To promote slavery is to promote socialism. The socialists will never admit it. But that is the real motive of these moral deviants.

Related Reading:

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

Why It’s So Important to Understand What Actually ‘Made America Great’ in the First Place

Was America 'made possible by stealing Indian land and the labor of slaves?'

The Southern Slave Economy Was Anti-Capitalistic

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism?

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism? - - 2

Slavery, Racism and Collectivism... and New Jersey's Folly