My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.