Slavery, Reparations, and Economic Limits

recent virtual reading group I explored the “what ifs” around me. reconstruction period. One way we explored was whether monetary compensation could have prevented the American Civil War. Englishman Slave owners received compensation in 1837 After the abolition of slavery in 1833, the United States in 1862 paid Loyal slaveholders $300 per freed slave as compensation for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. In both cases, slavery was abolished without bloodshed.

“What if?” It still seems big. Our group was asked by Claudia Goldin, “economics of liberation” is an estimate of the cost of voluntary emancipation by providing enslaved people with sufficient funds to purchase their freedom. (Of course, this would not have provided compensation to those who committed the greatest wrongs: those who were enslaved.)

We also read Richard K. Vedder’s “Slave exploitation (expropriation) rate”, which attempts to calculate how much more economic value slaves produced than they were “compensated for” through the cost of their treatment.

It is worth understanding that slavery was not only unjust, but also costly. Nevertheless, the question of sufficient compensation for slave owners and just compensation for free people misses the point if they try to stand alone. We can be misled by focusing on what we imagine we can measure and forgetting what we are actually trying to understand.

We would be better served by considering some of the questions that Liberty Fund is keen to ask and consult with reliable information. Let’s take a look at some of Liberty Fund’s favorite thinkers and apply what this group reads.

wear mine Hayek Cap: We do not and cannot know the price either here would have accepted because the choice was not given to them. data doesn’t exist Help us perform these calculations. The market was so corrupted by slavery.

what adam smith say? Marginal product estimates used to calculate exploitation are underestimations that short-change freedmen as compensation for their loss of income. Smith said,free compensation for labor” This is the result of workers’ diligence and higher production. This goes beyond the simple motivation to work harder for a good wage. Without the benefit of free labor, enslaved people would have been prevented or prevented from increasing their human capital. They were not rewarded for moving to a job that solved the problems they felt they could best solve. Sometimes moving was not allowed. Even if we can be sure that the data is good, the realized marginal product and working hours of slave workers cannot be the counter-performance for which they should be compensated.

Counterfactuals are difficult, even when talking about modern situations! When we talk about slave labor in 19th-century America, they seem insurmountable.

If there are good reasons to consider the available data to be extremely speculative, then more general observations about freedom, responsibility, and power may be more informative.

Smith observed not only slavery, but also the motivation to maintain a slave society like the one pursued by the Confederacy. He did not think that economic incentives were sufficient to overcome “a man’s pride makes him love his ruler, and nothing humiliates him so much that he must humble himself to win over those under him.” (WN III.ii) We have every reason to think that such economic considerations will never, or at least not soon, abate in the Southern States. We read some of that evidence in our reading group.

By reading the demands of the freedmen, we learn more about the (incredibly low!) economic prices the freedmen would have accepted after emancipation and the Union victory, e.g. Freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolinato Andrew Johnson). I’m sure they would have been happy if they had received full compensation, but if that were possible, the most important thing was freedom, not money. They wanted liberation (which they got) and the means to secure it over the long term (which they did not get).

We must also think in terms of power and freedom rather than money so that we can see that the exploitation of slaves was complete and not dependent on how much value was extracted from them or how comfortable they were kept.

In one of the most important passages in Wealth of Nations: “Indeed, the negroes, who make up the greater part of the inhabitants of the southern colonies of the continent, and of the West Indies, are doubtless in a worse condition than the poorest, because they are in a state of slavery. In Scotland or Ireland. But it must not be imagined, for that reason, that they eat worse food, or consume less goods than the lower classes of England, on which a moderate duty may be levied.” (WN V.iii)

It does not matter what ‘wages’ were paid to slave workers, given how exploited they were, because the exploitation was not just economic exploitation. There is no material compensation sufficient to justify slavery or eradicate exploitation.

We learn more about whether there was a price the Confederacy would have accepted by reading what they saw as their goals after their defeat.Pollard, a lost cause; Black Codes in Mississippi and South Carolina). We can also look beyond our reading to Confederate Constitution. It is difficult to explain not only the war, but the century of segregation and despotism it brought about and maintained despite its economic costs, and if money was what Confederates wanted. It’s easy to explain if what they were worried about was power and domination.

It is tempting to believe that there could be a sum of money that could produce economically just outcomes, avoid a Civil War, and mend relations among enslaved people. If so, it would make the incredible horrors of war and slavery scientific, rational and understandable. But in the end, these estimates are more of an interesting exercise for a certain type of modeler than a help in understanding what real opportunities were missed by Lincoln, the Confederacy, or the U.S. government during Reconstruction. .

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This article is an edited version of a comment I recently posted on VRG. Reconstruction: What if Lincoln had lived? If you like this type of discussion, check out: List of upcoming reading groups at Free Library Online.