Prometheus 6

Abiola has been busy tracking and photographing hotties instead of talking politics (smart man). But every so often...

On the Profitability of Slave Labor

In debates about the American Civil War and its causes, one often hears the argument advanced that the efforts of the Northern abolitionists were unnecessary as slave labor was already on the way out, owing to its declining profitability. I've always found this argument preposterous on its face, but in the course of reading Götz Aly's "Hitler's Beneficiaries", I am struck anew by the utter mendacity of such an assertion: not only did the Nazi regime make slavery pay, but it paid on a truly colossal scale, something on the order of $100-150 billion in the space of a handful of years. If slavery could be made to pay so handsomely in 1941-1945, and in a Germany whose economy was already far more knowledge-intensive than the American South would be until perhaps the 1980s*, why are we supposed to believe that slavery would be abolished today without a war to force its abolition? Why would the South have been willing to go to war to preserve a soon-to-be obsolete institution in the first place?

There's more, including a link to a paper on the economics of slavery in the antebellum South.

(See, Abiola is a libertarian that doesn't like how some folk twist his philosophy to justify saying "screw everyone" on a society-destroying level).