On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 02:16:23PM -0500, Gabriel Sechan wrote: > > >From: John Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:55:30AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> > Not really. Slavery was already on the way out, and would have been > >> > almost completely gone within another generation anyway. > >> > >> How do you know? It was alive and well for centuries before Civil > >> War. Why are you so sure it was going to automagically disappear > >> within another generation? > > > >The Industrial Revolution. Slaves were expensive and problematic... you > >have to pay for all of their upkeep, keep them from running away, etc. > >Machines came about twenty years later that quickly killed manual cotton > >picking. > > ANd its a lot cheaper to run machines with slave labor- as modern > factories have discovered in Asia. Manual picking slaves may have died, but > not slavery. Their uses would just have shifted.
Slaves in the Old South were hideously expensive, and uneducated. It would be much cheaper to hire free white guys to handle those machines. Modern Asia is a very different story. For one thing, most of those people aren't "slaves". They get paid a wage, and are not "owned". many Americans feel that the wage they make is equivalent to slavery, but that doesn't make it so... the cost of living is much lower. Just because X units of their money = $.50 a day doesn't mean they have the same standard of living as someone here who made $.50 a day would. For another, even where there is "slavery", they don't have to send ships over thousands of miles to pick up slaves, and then see half the cargo die on the way back. > >Actually, it would have been better for the North to have not forced the > >issue. The Federal government was always supposed to be extremely > >limited, and the states handled everything else. > > I never understood this argument- how is state power better than federal > power? If either government has a power, its potential for abuse. I can > understand saying no government should have power X, but saying its better > at the state level than the federal because states are magically better is > sheer sophistry. If you decide you don't like the way State A does things, you can pack up and move to State B. When the Federal government tramples all over your liberties, you have nowhere to go. Also, state governments are usually much more beholden to the voters than politicians at the national level... there's a short list of states you need to carry to become President, and you can ignore everyone else. -- *********************************************************************** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *********************************************************************** -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
