Hugh, the article is much shorter than I expected— even past the paywall it seems to be mostly just a pointer at “The intergenerational effects of a large wealth shock: white Southerners after the civil war,” by P. Ager, L. Boustan and K. Eriksson.
In most cases they still owned large plantations which was always the real source of wealth. Slaves were the means to extract that value from the land. The end of the war lined up with serval advancements in farming technology (or at-least the widespread use of them). Combined that with many of the former slaves having no transferable skills and very limited bargaining power forced them to work on the plantations for horrible wages.
Can I have reparations for the wealth that CEOs earned while my father worked long days and nights at the bottom of a mega corporation totem pole?
This is how capitalism has always worked. The conditions probably were worse, but theres millions and millions of people working for minimum wage right now, who live poor because people at the top live great.
Fun fact: in colonial days, grants of land, money, and food were mandated whenever a white slave is emancipated. Turning out all of the black slaves with nothing but the clothes on their backs was a new and intentional cruelty.
Jackson literally said slavery was going "to be not the real reason, but a pretext" for aggression against the south. Lincoln also said he wasn't trying to free the slaves.
Trust me, it's 100% possible to be living a life in 2019, even as an American, defined by tyranny and injustice. Now, not the same level of tyranny as Black slaves, but you'll become aware people are just the same. Most dont genuinely give a shit. The ones that do cant be bothered to do anything about it. Too many will takr advantage of you. And the closest most people can get to morality is defined by social norms.
Edit: people downvote this, sadly showing this to be right. What would show this to be wrong is if someone offered help. I'm pretty sure people just want to virtue signal.
The full Jackson quote you're looking for is: "Therefore the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and a Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery, question." He wasn't talking about the North making pretexts for aggression against the South, he was fed up with the South not adhering to the Union as he saw it.
Lincoln is a little more complex, but it suffices to say that the politics of slavery always took the forefront over whatever his personal beliefs may have been.
Ok maybe "northern aggression" is a bit too controversial word choice as this history is debated and some people are going to chime up and express their own personal expertise and disagreements. But this was my reading of it and also how it was taught to me uni, but it doesn't matter, we can agree for purposes of the main point that slavery (a moral cause) was a pretext and even today, it's hard to find people who care about what is right. I know this, because I'm dealing with blatant abuse.
Regardless of the merits of your statement (although tbh it's more of a rant than a cogent argument), I caution you not to take the downvotes as a sign you are correct. The downvoting may reflect how people received what you said, but does not address anything about the accuracy/correctness.
If you get what are basically bad feelings about someone's ideas, you can try to show them where they're unreasonable if you want to change their view. Relying on your negative feelings to let you insult them will almost always entrench their view, and for good reason.
Hate to break it to you, but downvotes do not prove that you are right. Sometimes they indicate that you're right and stepped on peoples' corns, but that's rare. It's more common that they indicate you're wrong, clueless, willfully blind to the available evidence, and/or being a jerk.
Using downvotes to validate your position is a logical fallacy. I see it often enough here that there ought to be a catchy name for it. Martyrdom Fallacy, maybe?
I kind of agree with your reply to citrablue, though - "downvote to disagree without explanation" is a really poor communication channel. "I was downvoted without comment, and now I see the error of my ways" said no one ever.
The point is that if I was wrong, there would be responses like, "what's wrong? How can I help, I would put my life on the line to help someone suffering from tyranny?"
But not one person has done that.
Anyways, about the downvotes thing. While focusing too much on the downvotes thing is kind of a distraction to the main idea, I can tell you I have a reasonable load of karma here and it is easy to get by writing comments stating the obvious, or agreeing with consensus. Controversial comments or novel ideas can be of high value, but garner low or negative karma. So I dont think you're really accurate about that. Further, generalizing about internet karma points as being especially meaningful in general contexts, like you did, is already a questionable idea.
Ok, I can understand that, but in this case there is particular meaning and decision made with regard to the problems I addressed. You should take another look to understand that part of it.
“””
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
“””
The Vice President of the Confederacy literally stood and gave a speech about why slavery was the reason they seceded from the union, but I’m not really surprised to find people who still try to distort the truth to push their views. It’s their way to virtue signal.
I'm not sure why you posted this. Are you sure you read my post? I never said the South wasn't fighting to keep slavery.
In fact, the main point of my post was closer to something like "people generally aren't good, but just want to virtue signal to sound good." Obviously, the fact that the south was even worse (and still even tried to justify it on moral grounds) seems to fit into that idea.
Anyways, the responses here are not giving me much faith in humanity. I'm still living with tyranny. Anyone want to step up, or just keep alternating between virtue signalling and being outraged?
Who cares if it's virtue signalling and outrage if it still leads to a good outcome? At some point awareness reaches a boiling point and change happens, maybe not as fast as it should but it happens.
Stop and frisk would not have mostly ended in New York City if people were not outraged by it. Of course ending it hasn't solved most of our problems, but it's better to have 99 problems than to have 100. Should we just sit on our hands until someone in a million years devises the utopia that is compatible with human behavior?
Should every injustice need to wait for its opportunity to be used as a pretext for power struggles in order for it to be thwarted?
What about the people living with tyranny today? Does it matter that they can ask for help and nobody cares about them. And people will even bully and criticize them? Even today? Even right here?
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain...
Jackson also literally said "In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated of has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes".
He was a racist white supremacist conspiracy theorist. His opinions on slavery are completely unrelated to the events that transpired 30 years after his tenure.
I really don’t get what the purpose of trying to make this the Oppression Olympics is. That one group is oppressed does not minimize another group’s oppression.
I don't know if this was used as justification for these practices, but see Deuteronomy 15:12-13 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+15&...): "If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. 13 And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed." Note that you only have to help out slaves upon freeing them if they are Hebrew, i. e. one of your own people.
What they did at the time was absolutely horrible. You're free but how free can you really when you need to keep food on the table and have never been taught any skills outside of your role as a slave? While they might have been granted freedom many, probably most, were not given the resources to truly act on that freedom.
That being said I think reparations at this point would ineffective and a politically infeasible. The money that would hypothetically be used for such a thing could be more effectively used providing services to low income areas.
As long as you remember which ethnic group(s) owned and shipped the majority of slaves, I'm totally cool with reparations. Reparations should of course be made from the coffers of the descendants of those individuals, where possible. Generational wealth is a very real problem in some countries.
Back then it would have been fair to give them payment for the years they worked for free (or shares worth the equivalent amount). It would likely have lead to a more equal society today. But we already fought a war over just freeing the slaves, I don't think giving them decades of wages at once was politically viable.
Reparations today would be an entirely different topic and would probably look more like social programs that seek to repair the lasting effects of the less than ideal way those people entered the (paid) workforce 150 years ago.
They also instituted black codes to ensure that the freedmen couldn’t enjoy the same freedoms as their white counterparts, and give their former slavers the same leverages they had previously. The post war institutions were just slavery with a better veneer.
They also created the KKK to accomplish with terrorism what the legal system and social norms couldn’t rig for them. That really persisted unabated into the late 50’s, and to an extent still exists. The violence has been reduced, but the economic devastation remains. There’s a reason that you can use zip code as a proxy for race in America.
That was the major ugliness of slavery, the double fault - keeping humans in captivity because it was believed the economy would collapse and even the slaves themselves would starve if freed.
Racism is a similar double-fault prejudice: "jobs are limited in number [wrong] so let's reserve them to 'our' kind of people [wrong and immoral]".
The problem with racism is that it works - populations that act preferentially towards their own have an advantage over those that do not: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html.bak
You are free to define 'us' any way you wish - it will not eliminate the advantage of races that define it to their benefit. Unless you believe other races have left racism behind them.
Interesting. I note the simulation doesn't have repeated interactions between individuals with memory... Yes, it acknowledges this. "Importantly, our decision to study a one-shot PD framework, where agents have no memory of previous interactions, significantly reduces the cognitive assumptions placed on our agents. A number of simulations have demonstrated how cooperation may emerge in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma framework, where agents remember the outcomes of previous interactions (Axelrod 1997; Fogel 1993; Sandholm & Crites 1996). We opted for Hammond and Axelrod's (2006) memoryless model because we are interested in ethnocentrism in its most elemental form."
You need memory to implement tit for tat, which is the classical case of something like moral behavior evolving spontaneously.
Their conclusion is that the recovery is "the result of elite networks acting as an invisible safety-net". As a thought experiment, how could this have been avoided? One columnist [1] suggests that the core action is "the children of the rich [forming] strong social bonds with the children of the poor". But this is hard to do if the rich have their own schools and neighborhoods and what not - so using the Fair Housing Act to further integrate neighborhoods is suggested. But who knows their neighbors these days? If you can pay for private schools, you basically never even have to talk to poor people. The costs of this would land squarely on the middle and upper-middle class, while the wealthiest could still buy their separation.
Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
> Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated doesn't help anyone.
> And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated doesn't help anyone.
There are a tremendous amount of public schools which give incredible educations. Much of the value of private schools is in social capital. While we can certainly point to the education levels of the worst of public schools and compare them with the best of private schools, the resume boost from a private school and the networks which are formed amongst parents and students have a much bigger impact on where a student lands than the actual differences in educations received.
As far as I'm aware, the authors have not eliminated the genetic confound here. Specifically, the propensity to accumulate wealth and power seems to have a genetic element, which would also explain the phenomena they observed wrt southern slaveholders regaining their wealth and power.
> Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
Something that might interest you is the fact that the current elites in China are largely the descendants of the country's pre-communism elite. Social engineering is hard.
I am kind of playing devil's advocate. I don't think any of that is a good idea. You're basically gulaging people at that point, which would be a good comparison -- did those guys get their money back? There was a thing on HN about how people in England with Norman names are still wealthier than those with Anglo-Saxon names about a millennium later. Now that was a conquest.
edit: they claimed to control for "skill" and inheritance (which should cover some of the genetic component) but I don't know how well as the paper is paywalled
"As a thought experiment, how could this have been avoided?"
We have good models for this. Many nations have employed highly effective GULAG systems that have achieved excellent results at wiping out all manner of unfairness and inequity.
The opportunity hasn't even yet been lost in the US. Cycling the white population through work camps could achieve a great deal in leveling the prevailing disparities.
I don't think it's possible to make rich (and I mean the real rich, not google-software-engineer rich) people move. Most incentives will be either to expensive or too cruel.
Middle class, on the other hand, would happily follow cheaper rents and shorter commutes as long as the neighborhood is safe and reasonably clean. The latter two are often the problem though.
Class is not about money. This was an iron law up until a couple hundred years ago but the American attempt to create a classless society obscures it. The earlier belief that class was about "blood" was crude and probably mostly inaccurate (although genetic affinity does confer some benefits to a group) but the real mechanism for class transference is more likely the unconscious education that children receive from interacting with their parents and their peer group.
European history is full of destitute monarchs and nobility. The key to understanding the elite is that they are usually not wealthy - they are deeply in debt most of the time and that is what makes them seem so successful.
To understand this simply: suppose you have lots of money. naturally people will try to take it from you and may even kill you to steal it. On the other hand suppose you have lots of debts. Your creditors must keep you alive in order to recover their money and will steer business your way because they have a stake in whatever you earn.
So, counterintutitve as it may seem, having (the right) debts will make it easier to succeed then having lots of money.
A study of all Americans born between 1978 and 1983, by economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter, found that even the black sons of wealthy parents exhibited extraordinary downward mobility relative to whites. They also had much higher rates of incarceration. Unlike white slaveholders after the civil war, intergenerational transmission of black wealth one century later seems much more fragile.
It has been extraordinarily easy to rob black families of their wealth, whether through exclusionary institutional policy that keeps them from building or maintaining wealth through conventional means, exclusionary networking that keeps them from learning about new and unconventional means, or simply through the act of burning it down.
Many wealthy black men and women are self-made in the real sense; that is, they don't have networks like the ones described in the article to pass down to their children, who, as a result, are essentially starting from square-one (plus their more elite educations, which only do so much good[1]).
The lack of access to basic banking services in low income area's is one of the biggest failures of the private banking system. Even when services are available they often are overloaded with cryptic fees which erode trust in all financial services.
There have been talks in the past of expanding the Post Offie's charter to encompass basic banking services like savings accounts and cashing check.
I sound like a Planet Money shill on this forum, but I'd recommend listening to a great episode [0] from 2013 which talks about 'folk' banking institutions used by people in the US. It takes its information from the US Financial Diaries project [1].
One interesting 'product' I'd never heard of was a savings club where every member contributes $x every month, and every n months you get $x*n. It performs a similar consumption smoothing as a credit product
Do you actually get the prevailing n-month CD rate of interest in that scheme, or is it purely to teach fiscal discipline? What's the point of collectivizing it? And it seems like people poor enough that they can't access traditional banking products would have a real problem with lack of liquidity if they have an emergency and need their savings immediately.
I think you answered your own question. The "lack of discipline" is not an internal failing, but an externality imposed disproportionately on poor people/PoC. Therefore, a savings product that makes access difficult in most cases but not impossible (for true emergencies), and without onerous penalty should access be necessary, makes its usage more palatable, even with the lack of interest.
The episode goes in to this. Typically these are people who would struggle with traditional financial institutions, and so they harness peer pressure as a savings tactic.
Popular in some black American communities. It’s aka a sou-sou. Not sure if there’s an interest payment element. I believe the biggest benefit is the solidarity of doing something (saving money) that’s hard to find discipline for on your own.
Reminds me of how Central Park is on land that was taken from a predominantly black neighborhood called Seneca Village. The government used eminent domain to strip the residents of their land. Where would those black families be if they were allowed to keep that land in the heart of NY?
You mean if the land taken from the native Americans that was sold African Americans, wasn’t acquired by NY?
At least the forced acquisition has a veneer of legal and public good.
But to speculate on your question, i strongly doubt that finding yourself owning prime land years after purchasing it translates to multi generation wealth. Yes the lives of those families would be better if they sold and did something useful with the money. I suspect mostly it would be wasted away, mismanaged and wilted down thru inheritance, that’s my observation from personal observation of how much land wealth my x*grandfather had compared to my parents
One of my most surprising moments in American history was learning about 'black wall street' and the race riots of Tulsa after WW1. I'm going to share a link here -- I'm not sure of the source's meta-bias, but this article I think is a balanced read.
are we still on about this? what good does it do other than make white feel bad and black entitled and powerless?
I suggest black Americans to go to Africa and Asia, not even extreme poor countries, see how life is there and see poor people's altitude toward life there. See if they bitch as much as you do, then read some books about happiness and how it has nothing to do with having equal to what privilege people have, and think about the purpose of your life, is it to claim things you deserve? Or to create things and do what is it that make you happy, regardless of circumtances?
Why are you suggesting that the black people should put themselves in poorer people shoes to understand your perspective? Shouldn't it be more efficient that they just put themselves in your shoes to understand your perspective? And you can do the same with them, understanding goes both ways and is not a one-side effort.
Is this also how you react when you come across stories of Holocaust survivors or their descendants? Let’s say in cases where they hope to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis.
“Are we still on about this? what good does it do other than make germans feel bad and jews entitled and powerless?
I suggest european jews to go to Africa and Asia...read some books on happiness and how it has nothing to do with having equal to what privilege people have, and think about the purpose of your life, is it to claim things you deserve?”
Chattel slavery was horrible and immoral which tends to make people forget that it was also incredibly stupid and inefficient. Wage slavery where people have the illusion of freedom but are still coerced by the threat of starvation and homelessness is a far more efficient form of exploiting labor. Once the slavers were forced to modernize their operations became much more profitable.
So recovery time was just about 20 years. It makes sense though. You replace $0 labour with $min_wage labour isn't going to put a big hole in wealthy person's pocket considering the fact that now they don't pay for food, cloths, shelter etc so the difference would be pretty minimal (the net gain for ex-slave population is left over from $min_wage, i.e., their savings which be zero to negligible). On the other hand, capitalism generally doubles wealthy person's assets every 10-20 years so any loss would be easily erased within couple of decades.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadWhich is itself behind a paywall [1].
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3363436
This is how capitalism has always worked. The conditions probably were worse, but theres millions and millions of people working for minimum wage right now, who live poor because people at the top live great.
EDIT what this 3 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ze4AA-p8w
Noam Chomsky holds the same opinion that I wrote here.
Trust me, it's 100% possible to be living a life in 2019, even as an American, defined by tyranny and injustice. Now, not the same level of tyranny as Black slaves, but you'll become aware people are just the same. Most dont genuinely give a shit. The ones that do cant be bothered to do anything about it. Too many will takr advantage of you. And the closest most people can get to morality is defined by social norms.
Edit: people downvote this, sadly showing this to be right. What would show this to be wrong is if someone offered help. I'm pretty sure people just want to virtue signal.
Using downvotes to validate your position is a logical fallacy. I see it often enough here that there ought to be a catchy name for it. Martyrdom Fallacy, maybe?
I kind of agree with your reply to citrablue, though - "downvote to disagree without explanation" is a really poor communication channel. "I was downvoted without comment, and now I see the error of my ways" said no one ever.
But not one person has done that.
Anyways, about the downvotes thing. While focusing too much on the downvotes thing is kind of a distraction to the main idea, I can tell you I have a reasonable load of karma here and it is easy to get by writing comments stating the obvious, or agreeing with consensus. Controversial comments or novel ideas can be of high value, but garner low or negative karma. So I dont think you're really accurate about that. Further, generalizing about internet karma points as being especially meaningful in general contexts, like you did, is already a questionable idea.
The Vice President of the Confederacy literally stood and gave a speech about why slavery was the reason they seceded from the union, but I’m not really surprised to find people who still try to distort the truth to push their views. It’s their way to virtue signal.
In fact, the main point of my post was closer to something like "people generally aren't good, but just want to virtue signal to sound good." Obviously, the fact that the south was even worse (and still even tried to justify it on moral grounds) seems to fit into that idea.
Anyways, the responses here are not giving me much faith in humanity. I'm still living with tyranny. Anyone want to step up, or just keep alternating between virtue signalling and being outraged?
Stop and frisk would not have mostly ended in New York City if people were not outraged by it. Of course ending it hasn't solved most of our problems, but it's better to have 99 problems than to have 100. Should we just sit on our hands until someone in a million years devises the utopia that is compatible with human behavior?
Should every injustice need to wait for its opportunity to be used as a pretext for power struggles in order for it to be thwarted?
What about the people living with tyranny today? Does it matter that they can ask for help and nobody cares about them. And people will even bully and criticize them? Even today? Even right here?
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain...
He was a racist white supremacist conspiracy theorist. His opinions on slavery are completely unrelated to the events that transpired 30 years after his tenure.
That being said I think reparations at this point would ineffective and a politically infeasible. The money that would hypothetically be used for such a thing could be more effectively used providing services to low income areas.
Reparations today would be an entirely different topic and would probably look more like social programs that seek to repair the lasting effects of the less than ideal way those people entered the (paid) workforce 150 years ago.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casual...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops
https://www.pbs.org/weta/reconstruction/
Racism is a similar double-fault prejudice: "jobs are limited in number [wrong] so let's reserve them to 'our' kind of people [wrong and immoral]".
You need memory to implement tit for tat, which is the classical case of something like moral behavior evolving spontaneously.
Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
[1] https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/redistribution-won-t-end-wealth-...
And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated doesn't help anyone.
There are a tremendous amount of public schools which give incredible educations. Much of the value of private schools is in social capital. While we can certainly point to the education levels of the worst of public schools and compare them with the best of private schools, the resume boost from a private school and the networks which are formed amongst parents and students have a much bigger impact on where a student lands than the actual differences in educations received.
> Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
Something that might interest you is the fact that the current elites in China are largely the descendants of the country's pre-communism elite. Social engineering is hard.
edit: they claimed to control for "skill" and inheritance (which should cover some of the genetic component) but I don't know how well as the paper is paywalled
We have good models for this. Many nations have employed highly effective GULAG systems that have achieved excellent results at wiping out all manner of unfairness and inequity.
The opportunity hasn't even yet been lost in the US. Cycling the white population through work camps could achieve a great deal in leveling the prevailing disparities.
Middle class, on the other hand, would happily follow cheaper rents and shorter commutes as long as the neighborhood is safe and reasonably clean. The latter two are often the problem though.
European history is full of destitute monarchs and nobility. The key to understanding the elite is that they are usually not wealthy - they are deeply in debt most of the time and that is what makes them seem so successful.
To understand this simply: suppose you have lots of money. naturally people will try to take it from you and may even kill you to steal it. On the other hand suppose you have lots of debts. Your creditors must keep you alive in order to recover their money and will steer business your way because they have a stake in whatever you earn.
So, counterintutitve as it may seem, having (the right) debts will make it easier to succeed then having lots of money.
It has been extraordinarily easy to rob black families of their wealth, whether through exclusionary institutional policy that keeps them from building or maintaining wealth through conventional means, exclusionary networking that keeps them from learning about new and unconventional means, or simply through the act of burning it down.
Many wealthy black men and women are self-made in the real sense; that is, they don't have networks like the ones described in the article to pass down to their children, who, as a result, are essentially starting from square-one (plus their more elite educations, which only do so much good[1]).
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/...
There have been talks in the past of expanding the Post Offie's charter to encompass basic banking services like savings accounts and cashing check.
One interesting 'product' I'd never heard of was a savings club where every member contributes $x every month, and every n months you get $x*n. It performs a similar consumption smoothing as a credit product
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/18/193176928/epis...
[1] https://www.usfinancialdiaries.org/
But to speculate on your question, i strongly doubt that finding yourself owning prime land years after purchasing it translates to multi generation wealth. Yes the lives of those families would be better if they sold and did something useful with the money. I suspect mostly it would be wasted away, mismanaged and wilted down thru inheritance, that’s my observation from personal observation of how much land wealth my x*grandfather had compared to my parents
https://www.theringer.com/2018/6/28/17511818/black-wall-stre...
I suggest black Americans to go to Africa and Asia, not even extreme poor countries, see how life is there and see poor people's altitude toward life there. See if they bitch as much as you do, then read some books about happiness and how it has nothing to do with having equal to what privilege people have, and think about the purpose of your life, is it to claim things you deserve? Or to create things and do what is it that make you happy, regardless of circumtances?
“Are we still on about this? what good does it do other than make germans feel bad and jews entitled and powerless? I suggest european jews to go to Africa and Asia...read some books on happiness and how it has nothing to do with having equal to what privilege people have, and think about the purpose of your life, is it to claim things you deserve?”
Whites make money. We make whites feel bad. Whites spend money to feel better. Or something. Who cares as long as whites spending money is involved.
> what good does it do
Good for the economy!