MMMark
May 23, 2010, 12:40pm
46
Sun. 10/05/23. post #107
[url=http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_304437.html ]
[/url]She anticipated my response. “Not directly. But the capital that made these innovations possible was extracted from slave labor. The wealth accumulated by slaveholders is what financed the industrialization that makes today’s wealth possible.”
I looked at her in raw disbelief. (Not a good strategy, by the way, for a public speaker.)
Collecting my thoughts, I pointed out that slavery had been an ever-present institution throughout human history until just about 200 years ago. Why didn’t slaveholders of 2,000 years ago in Europe or 500 years ago in Asia accumulate wealth that triggered economic growth comparable to ours? Why is Latin America so much poorer today than the United States, given that the Spaniards and Portuguese who settled that part of the world were enthusiastic slavers? Indeed, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil – in 1888, a quarter-century after U.S. abolition. By American and western European standards, Brazil remains impoverished.
And why, having abolished slavery decades before their Southern neighbors, were Northern U.S. states wealthier than Southern states before the Civil War?
I don’t recall my young challenger’s response. I recall only that I was as little convinced by it as she was by my answers.
Although logical, Boudreux’s answer is too long. He should have said: “Impossible. That capital was all destroyed during the waging of the civil war and the ensuing inflation, death and destruction.”