Friday, November 04, 2016

Comment Of The Day: Slave Labor Edition

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Disagree. People, especially then, are fully aware of the labors of slaves. That is why they were so expensive and valued. And caused a war. If the value of slave labor was not recognized, why fight for it? Racists simply think that is how things are supposed to be - an inferior people serving a superior race. They may say otherwise, but it's simply doublespeak trying to justify their beliefs.
And the northern factories gladly accepted the products of their tolls. Lincoln slapped a huge tax on exported southern cotton. Not because it was the result of slave labor, but because it was being sent to England instead of the north. Point, it was hardly just the south that was built and became rich from the backs of slaves. The south just had the land and better weather to grow crops.
There is more than a little hypocrisy that goes along with various liberal claims of moral superiority when it comes to the issue of slavery in the US. The North gladly took the goods and services provided by the South, as did the hypocritical European powers, who, decades before the Civil War, were decrying slavery from the pompous heights of soulful purity while buying goods from the American South and from various colonies, which were often held in a state of virtual slavery. Only the Quakers, on both sides of the ocean, who originally raised the cry about slavery, resisted the lure of profit and comfort from slavery.


If I had a time machine, one of things I would do is go far back in time and execute the first protohuman who had the idea of slavery. Our science, and its technology, has been set back at least a thousand years by slavery. Imagine, if you will or can, what it would be like to be living in the technological year 3016. New technology didn't get invented at the rate it does today because we once had a system of forced labor to create food and shelter. Of course, James Burke et.al., placed the machine age surge at the feet of the Black Death, which wiped out most of the serf (slave) labor in the Middle Ages, and that certainly is true. But slavery, through the ages has stalled our advance. Without slave labor, people would have been much more interested in Hero's steam engine back around year zero.

Slavery remains the single worst idea ever conceived by the mind of man, yet here we are today, once again dealing with deviants who want to return us all to the age of feudalism if not the Roman Empire itself. Somehow, we need to realize in the modern era, not everyone has to be slaving away to sustain body and soul, but that civilization will still have maintain a reasonable level of support for the unemployed--- whether that lack of a job is by their own hand or the consequence of machinations with the system. People have a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and Obamacare.