Slavery is undoubtably beneficial to Capitalism (ex: sea trade via the triangular trade routes), and the almighty dollar frequently overrides morality for the worse.
How do you think Boston became so wealthy? Slave mortgages and financing slave trips to Africa. Whaling didn’t take off until the latter declined, but the slave mortgages continued through the war.
South society was more about everyone having his place and being supposed to stay there. Social classes, entrenched large plantations that work slaves instead of hiring people. Slaves dont competed in market by selling their work and whites would sell slaves work out of pride.
Large chunk of economy was in slave ownership, it made people rich. But, it was not as much capitalism the way north was as a result.
"First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn’t own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters’ mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, “securitized."
"Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It’s hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined."
https://kottke.org/16/02/a-history-of-the-slave-breeding-ind...
a. Slavery is an evil, repulsive act, and if it's linked to capitalism, then that will (for good reason) lead to opposition to capitalism.
b. While it was economically good for some, it was bad for others, and you can't write down a sensible economic model in which ownership of others leads to an efficient outcome.
That's all I'm going to say about this crazy claim in an attempt to prevent its misuse.
I would argue it's also wrong, especially in the modern USA flavor of capitalism after the Friedman Doctrine[2] said that shareholders are actually immoral for not maximizing profits despite any other social responsibility. This is a "Paperclip Maximizer"[3] utility function where companies eventually figure out how to use legal, financial, and psychological/addictive tools to overwhelm the defenses of all consumers in a society. It's effectively a flavor of social darwinism.
Interestingly, capitalism might be kept in check given a strong enough government (eg. regulations designed and updated smartly to keep corporations from abusing the weakest consumers), but ours has largely been captured[4] by corporate interests.
[1] https://bppblog.com/2018/03/27/solution-aversion/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
The regulatory approach is a one-size-fits-all over-simplification of the vast diversity of interactions that take place in an economy consisting of millions of people. If there is an allegation that some party is exploiting another, it has to be provable in a court of law in order to have a reliable indication that the allegation is true.
Trying to generalize entire classes of interactions as exploitive and thus worthy of being prohibited is not a good way to organize a complex society. It inhibits opportunity and allows special interests to exploit the population at large through anti-competitive behavior far more than it creates opportunity and reduces exploitation.
A well-functioning society needs an active role for the government but that role should be in providing public goods, like objective information resources that consumers can resort to, not in limiting consumers' choices to protect them from their own bad judgment.
Why isn't that part of capitalism? Yes, it taints it, but really what it says to me is that unfettered capitalism will lead to "evil", repulsive acts, and that is exactly why, as problematic as it is, government must set legal boundaries around unacceptable behavior when such behaviors are discovered.
To make a modern analogy, it is legal for coal companies to "top" mountains, and to strip mine, and to release gigatons of CO2, and with it biologically significant amounts of mercury, massive amounts of particulates, large waste byproducts of coal ash and more. It is legal and profitable, so there are many companies doing it, despite the clear external costs to environment and the health of the population. Is this not part of capitalism?
To me, capitalism is about guaranteeing people's property rights. Some forms of indentured servitude might be considered a type of capitalism, but certainly not 19th-century American slavery, in which slaves had almost no rights (and the situation got worse as time progressed). In the very early days, slaves could even work for pay and eventually buy their freedom, but as the years went on, they were banned from this and later from owning property altogether.
Furthermore, history clearly shows that slave codes were continually tightened not because it was believed to be economically viable but because the population of the South was afraid of black people. Already in the eighteenth century it was made illegal for a slaveowner to free his slaves by fiat. It required approval from the government. How is that capitalist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission#United_States
>A 1723 law stated that slaves may not "be set free upon any pretence whatsoever, except for some meritorious services to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council."
This isn't some perverse overinterpretation of slaveowners' property rights. It's about fear, plain and simple. White people in the antebellum South did not want black people to be part of society. Capitalism can't explain that. There was a brief respite after some slaves fought for the patriots in the war and manumission was reinstated, but then:
>However, as population of free Negroes increased, the state passed laws forbidding them from moving into the state (1778)[34] and requiring newly-freed slaves to leave within one year unless they had special permission (1806).[35]
This was not just about money. Money doesn't explain "freed slaves must leave".
But the entire reason slavery existed wasn't fear of black people -- it was to use them to generate wealth, and not just for the slave owners; slavery propped up the economy of southern states. If the slaves had vanished overnight via a magic trick, it would have affect the economy of country as a whole, and cratered it in the south.
You are dismissing the primary reason for the perpetuation of US slavery by repeatedly pointing to one factor that was a byproduct of slavery.
If all of the slave owners freed their slaves voluntarily, either they are insane (i.e. society is doomed, everyone is crazy) or slavery is completely unnecessary to the economy. Anti-manumission laws cannot be explained by any rational economic motive.
Most of the other responses in this thread point out rightly that your predicate in item b) is the core problem of capitalism - profit is frequently optimized by creating negative externalities.
That is, simplistically speaking, employer pays employee, employee has steady income, employee goes to bank to deposit savings and take out a mortgage to buy a house, vastly improving quality of life. Bank uses savings to give out loans and mortgages allowing for people to start businesses and family lives, gains interest back, pays it back to savings accounts, etc.
Well, that was how it worked for a while anyway, nowadays I have no clue, outstanding mortgages are speculated with at high risk, banks spend your savings and the debt of your mortgage ten times over at least in financial constructions of exponential complexity, etc.
Laissez-faire[1] capitalism fundamentals require "freedom of the individual", but the definition of "individual" is usually not specific enough to afford it to all human beings or to prevent it from being ascribed to non-human entities. I wonder if we will ever get to a place where we recognize the intelligence of other species / non-human entities (non-terrestrials, AI, incredibly intelligent dogs/dolphins/elephants etc.) deserves these same protections in the economy.
Also worth noting that "negative externalities"[2] can also cause massive harm[3], but laissez-faire capitalism doesn't always afford for any protections against them (depending on how obvious/proximal they are to a human action/intention).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire
Communists leaders rationalized and explained communism. Not only incidentally, it made them more powerful. Thought leaders of nazi thought it is necessary to kill Jews.
Does not mean I have to buy those theories or treat them with naive "they surely meant well".
They are not the same thing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...
[1]: "African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites." (https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/)
[0]: And if you don't have money, you cannot access the commissary nor even make a simple phone call.
And if you don't have money, you cannot access the commissary nor even make a simple phone call.
You're wrong about America and the reason for incacerarion. The African American murder rate is 8 times the rate of whites and other violent crime is thereabouts.
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
It it is obviously because of social policy directed towards African Americans. Their murder rates skyrocketed mostly after the 1960s. And half my American family is black and none are incarcerated; lots of high ranking police, highly-decorated soldiers, and educators.
And not sure why you've decided to zero in on murder rates, as if everyone in prison is a convicted murderer. I also don't see how your family is relevant, as you can't extrapolate from that.
And I'm not a fan or private prisons. So we agree on that. Profit motive pre-dates capitalism. Arab slave traders in the 18th century weren't capitalist by any stretch. 16th century BC slavery in North Africa Egypt had nothing to do with capitalism. So you're confusing profit seeking, which has always existed, with capitalism.
The fact is that slavery was mainstream for thousands of years before Southern Democrat slavery. It's not a coincidence that within 70 years of the invention of the Eli Whitney cotton gin that slavery ended in the West all together. Cotton production multiplied. Capitalism ended slavery in the West, with the Civil War serving as the nail in the coffin. Furthermore, slavery was only a real big thing because of agrarianism before mechanization. Capitalism mechanized (e.g. cotton gin) the world in the industrial revolution.
And if you care about slavery, you may want to direct your attention to Libya were there are actual African slave auctions. Or if you care about unjust incarceration, I'd direct criticism at China for imprisoning large swaths of their Muslim population for simply being Muslim.
The fact is that African Americans are the wealthiest of African descendants per capita among any nation. And there are more millionaires of African descent in the United States than anywhere else. There are much higher rates of African American incarceration because they commit that much more crime. The reasons are not genetic but because of social policy that has resulted in 70% rates of single-parent homes in the African American community. FYI my African American half of the relatives are mostly married families. And none are in prison. Context.