Category Archives: Politics

The Truth About Slavery

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Was slavery a wrong or an inherited institution?

Did slavery originate in the English colonies in North America in the 17th century or do its origins go back before the time of recorded history?

Is slavery racist or is it based on economic motive?

If a person wants understanding, these are important questions.

But if a person wants to engage others in emotion for the purpose of gaining preferment and its rewards, money and power, or simply to enjoy the self-righteousness of moral denunciation of one’s fellows, these questions are in the way. The fact that these questions are never asked and are not a part of black studies programs in universities or the New York Times’ fake history project–the 1619 Project–is conclusive evidence that today slavery is an emotive word used to demonize white people and to bring preferment to black people.

Slavery is presented to American school children as something that white people did to black people. Therefore, white people are racists and must pay in some way for the slavery of black people that ended in the US 156 years ago.

There are so many unasked questions. For example, how did the blacks brought to North America become slaves? Who enslaved them? The answer, which explodes the narrative, is that blacks were enslaved by other blacks.

The main source of slaves for the slave trade was the black Kingdom of Dahomey. Dahomey engaged in slave wars with other black kingdoms or tribes and became the dominant power.

As Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Dahomey was organized for war, not only to expand its boundaries but also to take captives as slaves. Slaves were either sold to the Europeans [or Muslims] in exchange for weapons or kept to work the royal plantations that supplied food for the army and court.”

The socialist Karl Polanyi wrote the classic work: Dahomey and the Slave Trade published in 1966. The book does not fit our woke time and the black studies agenda, and it is no longer available in print.

Today Dahomey is known as Benin. On the beach at Ouidah there is a contemporary monument, the Gate of no Return, commemorating the lives of the Africans captured by the black Kingdom of Dahomey and sold to Arabs and Europeans as slaves or traded for firearms.

In other words, the origin of black slaves was black slave traders.

Why did European sea captains bring black slaves to North America? The answer is that there was fertile land capable of producing profitable crops and no labor force. Those who held land grants or charters from the English king needed labor to make the land usable. There was no other work force.

Slaves were brought to the US not because of racism but for economic motives. Black Africans sold other black Africans to merchants for firearms that established Dahomey’s dominance. The merchants sold the slaves as a labor force to those who held land that originated in land grants or charters from the English monarch and had no one to work it. Slavery was established as the agricultural labor force long before the United States existed.

This brings us back to the opening question of this essay. Was slavery a wrong or an inherited institution? Whether or not something is wrong depends on the morality of the time. At the time the black Kingdom of Dahomey and the other blacks with whom Dahomey engaged in slave wars did not consider slavery wrong. Neither did the Arabs who for centuries had raided European coastal towns for white slaves. Neither did the Europeans who brought the purchased slaves to North America. Neither did the colonists who purchased a labor force. Neither did the original slaves, captives who themselves had fought in slave wars.

Slavery had been a fact of life for millenniums. Long before white peoples had black slaves, they had white slaves, and were themselves slaves owned by Arabs. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries North Americans were enslaved when US merchant ships were captured by North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. For some years the US Congress paid large sums to ransom Americans enslaved in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. President Thomas Jefferson tired of it and sent US Naval forces that captured Tripoli and broke up the practice of enslaving captured American merchant ship crews—thus in the US Marines anthem—“to the shores of Tripoli.”

Slavery was everywhere. It was an inherited institution. In the African slave wars, a man could begin the battle a free person and if defeated find himself a slave. A person born to slave parents knew no other life. In North America where slaves comprised the agricultural labor force, everyone was born into a society in which slavery was an established institution. It was the result of a choice made in a distant time when there was no alternative labor force.

The American and French revolutions, as they are called, resulted in an idealism of the free autonomous person, and those affected by this ideal turned on slavery as wrong, as it seems to be under this ideal of Western Civilization. However, it was not wrong in black Dahomey.

How one disposes of an entire labor institution and replaces it was never described by those who wanted an end to slavery in the 19th century. Landowners owned the land and the labor. To require them to free their slaves would be to deprive them of a large part of their capital. If they freed their work force, they would have to hire them back with wages, but after such a capital loss where would the wages come from? Would taxpayers fund a government program to compensate owners for freeing their slaves? These are major questions during a time period when many other major questions took precedence. To reconfigure a country’s established institutions is an extraordinary undertaking. The Communists attempted it in the 20th century, and did not meet with success.

Mechanization has replaced the bulk of the agricultural work force, but it wasn’t an available alternative at the time. If it had been, what would have provided the livelihood for the freed slaves? In the end it was sharecropping, which kept the former slaves tied to the land as they had been as slaves and as medieval serfs had been tied to the land. Instead of wages, sharecroppers shared in the ownership of the crop and the proceeds from the sale.

In the US the heavy immigration would have eventually produced a free labor force except for the fact that until the frontier was closed at the end of the 19th century, immigrants could move west and claim land they occupied. Most preferred working their own place to working as labor for another person.

Jobs offshoring has eliminated most of the American manufacturing labor force, and those who had manufacturing jobs find themselves today with diminished living standards. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots are eliminating much of the rest of human employment. The question of human employment in a world of automation and AI remains an evaded question, just as abolitionists evaded the question of the fate of freed slaves. President Lincoln wanted to send them back to Africa or to a Central or South American destination.

If slavery was such an evil, why did Congress resurrect slavery with the 16th Amendment in 1909 and the states ratify it in 1913? To understand what I mean, ask yourself what is the definition of a slave? A slave is a person who does not own his own labor or the products of his labor. If you are subject to an income tax, you do not own your own labor.

Part of a slave’s work goes to his own maintenance. Otherwise, if he is not fed, clothed, housed, and his health attended to, his owner loses his labor. The rest of his labor could be appropriated by his owner to cover the cost of the slave’s purchase and to turn a profit. For a 19th century slave in the US the tax rate was approximately 50%. For a medieval serf, the tax rate was lower as he had less technology and therefore was less productive. A medieval serf could not reproduce if his tax rate exceeded 30%, or such was the view years ago when I studied the medieval economy. Unlike a slave, a serf was not bought and sold. He was attached to the land. Like a slave, he was taxed in terms of his labor. The lord of the manor had use rights in the serfs’ labor, and the serfs had use rights in the land.

Formerly serfs were free farmers. After the collapse of Roman power, they had no protection against Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders. To survive they provided labor to a chieftain who constructed a walled tower and maintained fighting men. In the event of raids, serfs had a redoubt to which to flee for protection. In effect, serfs paid a defense tax. They exchanged a percentage of their labor for protection. Serfdom became an established institution and continued long after the raids had stopped. In England serfdom was ended by the Enclosures which stripped serfs of their use rights in land and created a free labor market.

Consider the US income tax. When President Reagan was elected the tax rate on investment income was 70%. The top tax rate on wages and salaries was 50%. In other words, the privileged (mainly white) rich were taxed at the same rate as 19th century black slaves.

How is an American on whose labor the government has a claim a free man? Clearly, he is not a free man. We can say that there is a difference between a present day American and a slave, because the government only owns a percentage of his labor and not the person himself–unless the person does not pay his taxes, in which case he can be imprisoned and his labor hired out to private companies who pay the prison for the use of the prisoner’s labor.

The extraordinary failure to ask the relevant questions discussed in this essay has caused a racial division in the US infused with hatred. This hatred is cultivated every day by an irresponsible media, by the Democrat Party, by the universities, by the NY Times 1619 Project, and by the critical race theory taught in public schools. Now that all this hate has been created, how do we get rid of it? With misinformation passing as scholarly fact, how do we recover truth and escape the lies that are destroying us.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review

The Unimaginable Arrogance of Socialists

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“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society.

As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education.

We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all.

We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality.

And so on, and so on.

It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

Frédéric Bastiat, “The Law”

The Forgotten Gifts of American Voluntarism

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 Over the course of the pandemic, many were cheered by the myriad ways in which people rallied to help their fellow citizens. But many protested—wasn’t this the government’s job? Shouldn’t the government supply PPE rather than relying on citizens to sew face masks, ensure that children didn’t go hungry, and to feed and house front-line medical staff? With much of this discussion shaped by the polarizing response to then-President Donald Trump, it is helpful to be reminded that the debate about the respective roles of the government and the citizens in responding to crisis goes back even before the country’s founding.

Elisabeth S. Clemens’ Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State supplies this history. Dr. Clemens, who is the William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and a specialist in the political development of the United States, takes an episodic approach by studying crises from the Boston Tea Party through the Great Depression and World War II. Her focus is on benevolent or charitable associations, which step in to meet welfare needs during crises. At issue is the proper balance among self-reliance, voluntary associations, and government to provide for citizens’ welfare. Dr. Clemens sees an “unexpected prevalence of charity and benevolence” from both government and voluntary associations. “The puzzle,” she writes, “is to understand how charity and the gift became central elements in a purportedly liberal and individualistic political culture.”

Conservative readers who believe widespread charity and a robust civil society are spontaneous components of a healthy liberal democracy may be less puzzled about how charity and individualism go hand-in-hand. This quibble aside, there is much to appreciate in this important history of voluntary associations and their relationship to government. Particularly noteworthy is Dr. Clemens’ attention to the power of ideas to shape action, evidenced by her frequent quotations from speeches, correspondence, and papers of the men and women who led or opposed various associations and benevolent initiatives. Dr. Clemens challenges what she sees as a too-simple narrative of Americans as inveterate founders and joiners of associations, a narrative she attributes to “a stylized summary of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.” She presents a history of voluntary associations that is complicated and contested (and she points out Tocqueville’s own account of associations is more nuanced than is often supposed).

As Dr. Clemens explains, voluntary benevolent associations were essential to the very founding of the United States. When the British blockaded the port of Boston in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, “communities throughout the colonies contributed sheep, cattle, barrels of rice, and the occasional pipe of brandy to the Boston Committee on Donations” to sustain the Bostonians, who “were understood to be suffering for a nation or polity that had not yet been formally declared.”

But while support for the Boston Committee on Donations helped to write a “story of peoplehood” and paved the way to the Founding, Dr. Clemens writes that this did not translate into unqualified support for voluntary associations among the Founders and early civic leaders. Dr. Clemens quotes Noah Webster’s statement that voluntary associations were “useful in pulling down bad governments; but…dangerous to good government;” Thomas Jefferson’s view that “permitting the spread of voluntary associations and corporations would threaten equality by allowing a small minority, a cabal, to exercise disproportionate influence over public life,” and George Washington’s objections to “the promiscuous mixing of mutual benevolence and state- and national-level political didacticism.”

Of course, these same men led voluntary associations. Webster, for example, founded the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery and Washington was the first president general of the Society of the Cincinnati. But Dr. Clemens surprises readers who supposed early American leaders were unambiguously supportive of associations as civic institutions by describing their worry that associations could be vehicles for factions. Voluntary associations had an important role, but not as organizations dispensing charity in place of government. Washington, for example, arranged for the charitable funds of the Society of the Cincinnati to be turned over to and dispensed by state legislatures to avoid citizens’ dependence on a private association.

Dr. Clemens writes that, by the Civil War, three competing visions about the relationship between benevolent voluntary associations and government had emerged. One vision kept alive the views of Washington, Jefferson, and Webster, that there should be no “promiscuous mixing” of these associations with government functions. Dr. Clemens cites Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and member of the United States Sanitary Commission. The commission was founded during the Civil War to advise the U.S. Army’s medical corps, but became a vehicle for channeling citizens’ donations to Union soldiers. Howe eventually resigned, writing “it would be a misdirection of public charity to do what the Government can do, and ought to do, and will do.” This vision emphasized self-reliance, but when it came to providing for soldiers, their widows, or the worthy poor, it is government that should meet these needs, not charities.

Another vision championed these associations as a popular check on the power of government. This vision sought to replicate the success of the Boston Committee of Donations through broad citizen contributions to support (and thereby influence) government and civic causes, and to build a sense that the nation was striving to meet shared aims. During the Civil War, this view was exemplified by the exact organizations that Howe found so objectionable: the United States Sanitary Commission and its peer the United States Christian Commission. Dr. Clemens quotes one observer: “the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, in their ultimate results, are to make the armies of the world the armies of the people and not of kings.”

A final vision agreed on the importance of associations supporting government and civic causes, but distrusted populism. This was the vision of business and social elites, who wanted to ensure voluntary associations “bypassed both the strict constraints of electoral democracy and the dangerous powers of a centralized bureaucratic state.” During the Civil War, this vision was exemplified by organizations in major cities such as “the elite-dominated [New York] Union Defense Committee [which] raised volunteer regiments, collected funds to support soldiers’ wives and families, and eventually took charge of public funds to support their voluntary effort.”

Despite being a major force in American civil life from the Boston Committee on Donations through the first quarter of the 20th century, popular benevolent associations are nearly absent today.

While the first vision opposed any mixing of charities and government, the other two embraced this mixing but were at sharp odds about whether popular or elite sensibilities should lead. Dr. Clemens tells how the tensions between the latter two visions led to blows between Ernest Bicknell, who embodied elite-led benevolence at the turn of the 20th Century as secretary of the Chicago Bureau of Associated Charities, and Father Basil, a Catholic priest. Frustrated by the Bureau’s denials of his request for support for a home for boys, Father Basil went to the Bureau’s offices and gave a beating to Ernest Bicknell. Father Basil had stopped by a courthouse on his way and been advised that the fine for assault ranged from three to one hundred dollars—apparently a price was worth paying to deliver a message to the elites that they should harken to those actually working and living among the poor.

Dr. Clemens describes how each of these three visions had their champions and critics during the Civil War, depressions of 1873 and 1893, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, World War I, and the Mississippi Flood of 1927. Leading players appear repeatedly: Ernest Bicknell survived his encounter with Father Basil to go to San Francisco in the wake of the earthquake—uninvited by local authorities but at the direction of several Illinois organizations—and would later become first national director of the Red Cross. Over the decades, these three visions were realized in new forms. Community Chests, for example, became favored vehicles for elite philanthropy, while Block-Aid—which introduced the first “call this number now” appeals—became a vehicle for popular support of government relief efforts.

The Great Depression fundamentally reset this contest as the economic crisis overwhelmed the ability of citizens and voluntary associations. Instead, the government took primary responsibility for providing for citizens’ welfare. However, even during the Depression, voluntary associations still enjoyed support in many quarters. Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself championed the March of Dimes, then known as the Committee to Celebrate the President’s Birthday, to raise funds for polio research and treatment. In short, each vision persisted, even as the balance shifted inexorably away from citizen self-reliance to voluntary associations entwined with government and to government itself.

Dr. Clemens’ account of these episodes and how different visions informed the balance of citizen self-reliance, voluntary associations, and government in response to those crises is a valuable history; it provides us a new framework in which to take stock of the health of American voluntary associations and civic life during our current pandemic crisis. To do so, we may ask how—if at all—her three visions remain present today.

The vision most conspicuous today is of elite-led voluntary associations working in concert with government. For example, during the Obama Administration, as Megan E. Tompkins-Strange detailed, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and other elite philanthropies played a major role in reshaping education policy (so much so that an Obama-era Department of Education official once referred to the “Obama Administration” as the “Gates Administration”). During the pandemic, celebrity chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen exemplifies a new kind of elite-led voluntary association that works in concert with government: FEMA subsidized WCK to provide food in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and during the pandemic, state and local governments are using FEMA funds to provide meals from WCK.

Despite being a major force in American civil life from the Boston Committee on Donations through the first quarter of the 20th century, popular benevolent associations are nearly absent today. Dr. Clemens notes that “by December 1917, 22 percent of the American population had made a least the basic contribution that signified membership in the organization” to support the American effort in World War I. Today, Americans are so fragmented and polarized that no organization has the trust of so many. To be sure, Americans give more generously than ever: during 2020, giving rose 11%, and small donors, whose gifts had fallen off in recent years, contributed to that boost. Indeed, there may be reasons to favor smaller, local associations over a national association such as the Red Cross; but the fact that it is difficult to imagine so many coming together to support a single organization testifies to a lost sense that we can rally to face together national challenges. Dr. Clemens book, completed shortly before the pandemic, ends with a nostalgic hope that Americans could recover the possibility of mobilizing in a crisis through voluntary associations, acting as “democratic citizens [who] insisted that government depended not only on popular consent but popular contribution.” The events of the fifteen months have shown just how difficult it would be to realize that hope.

Dr. Clemens’ excellent study helps us understand the visions and practices of voluntary benevolent associations throughout America’s history—and provides a vantage point for assessing the erosion of our feelings of solidarity and common purpose with our fellow citizens.

Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill

The Actual Definition of Inflation

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Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term `inflation’ to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. . . . As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. They try to keep prices low while firmly committed to a policy of increasing the quantity of money that must necessarily make them soar. As long as this terminological confusion is not entirely wiped out, there cannot be any question of stopping inflation.”

–Economist Ludwig von Mises

The Wisdom of Ayn Rand

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An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate . . . .

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .

It is doubtful—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares; “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts.

Observe the technique involved . . . . It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.

Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.

So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate . . . . Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

Will Biden be America’s Hugo Chavez

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The Communists came to power in Venezuela when the party seeking power — under Hugo Chavez — wrote all the election rules and everyone had to play by them. Not surprisingly, Chavez became the dictator; when he eventually died, his party remained in power. That same Communist party starves and tyrannizes its citizens to this day.

Hyperinflation played a role in the ability of the Communists to seize power in Venezuela. Similarly, back in the 1930s, hyperinflation played a role in the ability of Hitler to seize power in Germany. Tyrants feed on fear, and deliberately worsen conditions so that people will remain afraid. Fear gives them more power and control. Does any of this sound familiar?

People in Venezuela (and many who fled) look back on Hugo Chavez like people look back on Hitler. Could the same be said one day of Joe Biden? “How could they be so stupid to elect this fool? He ruined America.” Of course, the government rewrote the election rules here, too. They did so unofficially in 2020, and in 2021 and 2022 they will make it official, by passing laws that permanently rig future elections in one party’s favor. And most of us decided to roll over and accept it. Trump in 2024? It’s a joke. Nobody is going to get power from these statists. Most don’t (yet) realize what we’re up against. It’s really no different than if the Nazis had won in 1945, and America is now a totalitarian dictatorship.

Inflation, by the way, is not caused by mean people raising their prices. Read an economics book. It’s caused by the government’s expansion of the money supply (since the government controls the currency, not the market, ever since we went off a gold standard.) When the Federal Reserve artificially increases the supply of the dollar (usually so it can spend), it makes the value of your dollars lower than it would otherwise be; this triggers a rise in prices. It happened in the 1970s and it’s happening again. Since 2020, the government of the U.S. has been massively expanding the money supply (because of unprecedented spending) and as a result we’re getting higher prices with everything. Millions will suffer and dislike it, but in their fear they’ll give a green light to tyrants that could make 2020 and early 2021’s “scamdemic” look like child’s play.

If you think the United States is too prosperous, too special or too infallible to fall prey to similar disasters, you could be in for a rude awakening. It’s your country. If you lose it all by tolerating or actually voting for these dictators, then it’s YOUR fault. I’m going to say so … while I still can.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason