George Bush, Protectionist
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”
Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, Bush, by omission, excluded BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai—though all operate auto plants here in the United States and all are feeling the same sales slump.
Indeed, Toyota claims losses for the first time in 70 years—though how Toyota’s management was able to keep sales up in 1945, when Gen. Curtis LeMay’s B-29s were conducting their nightly visits, escapes me.
Bush may believe he has sinned against free-market principles, but he is following the path of his great free-market predecessor. Ronald Reagan, too, was not prepared to see Japan take down the U.S. auto industry, or steel industry, or computer chip industry, or Harley-Davidson.
Believing Japan was dumping to destroy U.S. companies, Reagan put patriotism before ideology and imposed quotas on Japanese imports. He, too, was castigated by the same commentariat that is berating Bush.
Vice President Cheney, too, has endorsed the bailout of Detroit. Of the senators who voted to pull the plug on General Motors, Cheney is said to have remarked, “It’s Herbert Hoover time” up there in the GOP caucus.
Averting Chapter 11 for GM, which could lead to liquidation of the greatest manufacturing company in U.S. history—cutting America out of the premier consumer market of the 21st century—makes sense not only from the standpoint of politics, but economics, as well.
For other nations, as The Washington Post reports, are far ahead of Bush in sheltering their industries and protecting their markets:
“Moving to shield battered domestic manufacturers from foreign imports, Indonesia is slapping restrictions on at least 500 products this month, demanding special licenses and new fees on imports. Russia is hiking tariffs on imported cars, poultry and pork. France is launching a state fund to protect French companies from foreign takeovers. Officials in Argentina and Brazil are seeking to raise tariffs on products, from imported wine and textiles to leather goods and peaches, according to the World Trade Organization.”
India has levied a 20 percent duty on soybeans to cut imports and protect her farmers. The United States has just filed charges with the World Trade Organization against China for “unfair support of its export industry—including the award of cash grants, rebates and preferential loans to exporters.”
Awfully late in the game, Bush seems to have awakened to an ancient reality. When the tough times come, nations protect their own interests first, free trade be damned.
“Country first,” as the John McCain slogan ran.
Libertarians of the Milton Friedman school may be unforgiving of Bush. But what has their free-trade globalism given us, but $5 trillion in trade deficits since Bush 1 and a new dependency on foreigners for the necessities of our national life and the loans to pay for them?
Were all the Playstations and Priuses worth it?
By traditional free-trade theory, a nation should import what it does not produce from the nations that produce it most cheaply.
But in 1946, Japan produced almost no steel, no TVs and no cars. Instead of buying them from America, Tokyo subsidized its own steel, TV and auto industries for decades, and protected their market. Now, as Sony did to Philco and Dumont, Toyota, Honda and Nissan are taking down Ford, GM and Chrysler. Were the Japanese foolish to subsidize their industries and protect their market? Were we wise to let our TV industry be taken down, and watch our auto and steel industries driven to death’s door?
To 1970, Boeing, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas produced almost all of the world’s jetliners. But rather than rely in perpetuity on Americans for passenger planes, Britain, France, Germany and Spain subsidized a socialist cartel, Airbus, that did not make a profit for 25 years and sold its planes for less than it cost to build them.
That trampled all over free-trade theory, but it did kill Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas and almost killed Boeing.
Were the Europeans foolish to create an aircraft industry and subsidize the destruction of Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas? Or were they wise to sacrifice today to capture the world’s aircraft market of tomorrow?
Like Prohibition in Hoover’s phrase, globalism is “an experiment, noble in purpose, that has failed.”
As we have learned, at a cost of $10 trillion in wealth wiped out on Wall Street, the nations of the future are not the consumer nations that pile up debt as they live on imports, but the producer nations that save and sacrifice and make the things the world wants.
With the tax-and-trade policies of the Old Republican Party that made America first by putting Americans first, we can be that nation again.
As for President Bush, welcome to the Protectionists Club, sir.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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1 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 26 December 2008:
America FIRST! Absolutely correct, Mr. Buchanan.
And I’d love to see those free-trade ideologues disemboweled with a serrated scimitar for what they have done to us.
2 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 26 December 2008:
Contrary to repeated claims, the U.S. has NEVER had a real free trade policy.
3 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 26 December 2008:
Here is the real history. When protectionism was a boon to Northern capitalists and a burden to everyone else, we had protectionism. Now that Northern capiutalists find it more profitable to be invested in international speculation rather than industry, we have “free trade,” a boon to them and a burden to everyone else. The problem is not in this or that policy but in who wields the decisive financial power. It is as simple as that.
A solution can only be foiund by confronting the real power.
4 Comment by robert m. peters on 26 December 2008:
What is this “free trade,” for which one is to be disemboweled? I have seen neither hide nor hair of anything remotely resembling “free trade” in my fifty-nine brief years on the Earth. I just asked my ninety-two-year-old mother if she had seen any “free trade” in her lifetime. Her answer was “No!” It, therefore, appears to me that “free trade” is the scapegoat for “something” posing as “free trade.” The wolf kills the sheep and blames the old dog, which either never existed or which died long ago.
5 Comment by Bob Johnson on 26 December 2008:
robert m. peters,
Free Trade is the term Globalists used to sell their ideas to the dull-witted masses.
When said Globalists speak among themselves, they almost always refer to it as “economic integration”.
The most extreme Globalists, the ones like the m who think and feel the thoughts and feelings of Karl Marx, view this cause of economic intergration less as way to help the northern capitalists, and more as a way to pave the way to the creation of supernational governments modeled after the EU.
Patterson of the CFR, if I remember his name correctly, came right out and told everyone who cared to listen that this was the true intention behind Bush’s SPP abomination.
And did Bush every deny the contentions of his close supporter Patterson?
He never did, partly because those contention were utterly true, and partly because the stupid globalist swine of the mass media never thought to ask him.
It’s a very funny thing that Bush asked Americans to die for a country he was working behind the scenes to dissolve.
And with the exception of some truly brave men like Jerome Corsi and Lou Dobbs, the media covered it up.
And thus most of the soldiers probably never even heard of what their commander in chief was up to.
6 Comment by Mark Higdon on 26 December 2008:
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN…
This is a jejunely ironic rephrasing of the Vietnam War-era tactic of destroying the village in order to save it. Spoken, this time, by the village’s idiot-in-chief. And applied on a much grander scale.
7 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 December 2008:
“The most extreme Globalists, the ones like the m who think and feel the thoughts and feelings of Karl Marx, view this cause of economic intergration less as way to help the northern capitalists, and more as a way to pave the way to the creation of supernational governments modeled after the EU.”
Are you kidding me? Marxists are all for artificial trade barriers – just look at Venezuela. The number one opponents of ‘free trade’ in the EU are – wait for it – the communist and socialist parties!
8 Comment by Bob Johnson on 26 December 2008:
Maxwell,
I said the m has the thoughts and feelings of Karl Marx, and if you were well learned enough to properly research the enemy’s ideas you would realize that Karl Marx was a HUGE supporter of Free Trade because it weakened the national identity and allegiance he considered the biggest barrier (save perhaps religion) to his rabidly globalist goals.
Hugo Chavez is against Free Trade for nationalistic reasons, he understanding that multi-national corps were pulling an awfully suspicious amount of money out of his country before he came along, and his anti-Free Trade stands are only incidentally related to his socialistic idea that the poor of his country should get to mooch off the spanish descended elite.
And actually, even under Hugo, their blacks and injuns are still much more self-reliant than our blacks and injuns.
9 Comment by Thomas A. Miller on 26 December 2008:
I’ll bet Daniel Maxwell is such a fanatic for Free Trade that, to that end, he even supports Open Borders immigration. Afterall, any borders between countries represents a barrier to the free trade in services by non-national service-providers, to quote the euphemistic language of our modern day Free Trade Agreements.
10 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 December 2008:
Mr Miller, please do not put words in my mouth.
11 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 December 2008:
Re : #8
“… and if you were well learned enough to properly research the enemy’s ideas you would realize that Karl Marx was a HUGE supporter of Free Trade because it weakened the national identity and allegiance he considered the biggest barrier (save perhaps religion) to his rabidly globalist goals.”
I admit not being well-versed in all of Marx’s work, however the official ‘Marxist’ position is that free trade is bad.
12 Comment by John Seiler on 26 December 2008:
I hate to point this out to Pat and the others, but the whole Big Three bailout is unconstitutional. Only Congress can spend money. It never passed a Big Three bailout. Bush just grabbed the money from the other bailout funds — totally illegally and unconstitutionally.
The Big Three bailout also will be administered by — this may surprise some of you — the Obama administration. They’re just going to produce expensive Green Yugos nobody will want to buy. The new Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate is Carol Browner, who hates cars and Detroit.
And because the bailout will delay needed, private-sector changes in at GM and Chrysler, they’ll never recover. Maybe Ford will because it’s not taking the bailout dough.
The Big Three have been driving off a cliff for 40 years. Check out the 1983 book, “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry,” by Brock Yates, still the definitive story of the auto industry’s auto-destruction. He told them what was wrong 25 years ago, and they still haven’t corrected it.
Oh, and I’m sure most of you would agree, if we hadn’t blown $5,000,000,000,000.00 on the Iraq War, that money could have gone to reduced business taxes that would have allowed Detroit to retool, and to personal income tax cuts that would have shored up sales, and to NOT inflating the currency and NOT running up massive debt and deficits.
13 Comment by John Seiler on 26 December 2008:
It’s also worth pointing out that the foolish voters of Michigan twice elected Jennifer Granholm as governor. Although born in Canada, she grew up in California’s Bay Area and is a Left Coast, Green environmentalist fanatic. She has smashed the auto industry and has kept taxes high. She has refused to enact needed labor and other reforms. She’s also a pro-abortion “Catholic,” even though Michigan is one of the few states where most Democrats still are pro-life (largely because of the “ethnics” who came there to work in the factories).
Now Granholm is an economic adviser to Obama. With Bush, Obama, and Granholm running the U.S. economy, soon the America will resemble Romania under Ceausescu.
14 Comment by Mark Higdon on 26 December 2008:
Seiler @13 “Michigan is one of the few states where most Democrats still are pro-life”
No Democrat (or anyone else) who voted for pro-death Granholm is pro-life. Equally true of any “pro-lifer” who voted for the murderous warlord W. Bush or his would-be-now-has-been Republican successor, who is an execrable “pro-life” poseur.
Anyone I know personally who blogs here and disagrees with the previous sentence is invited to call me or meet me outside church to discuss. I mean nothing personal against anyone, but I stand by my logic and will gladly defend it in Christian charity.
Of course, feel free to justify your “pro-life” votes for McCain and W. Bush on this forum.
15 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 December 2008:
Re #12
“I hate to point this out to Pat and the others, but the whole Big Three bailout is unconstitutional. Only Congress can spend money. It never passed a Big Three bailout. Bush just grabbed the money from the other bailout funds — totally illegally and unconstitutionally.”
B-but he only wants unconstitutional acts done for patriotic reasons! It’s ok as long as it’s patriotic!
16 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 26 December 2008:
“Now Granholm is an economic adviser to Obama…”
How is it that someone who probably knows next to nothing on economics is advising someone knows less than nothing about economics?
17 Comment by nikopiko on 27 December 2008:
Greed. It is a funny little quality that most humans can not overcome.
“Free trade” only happens when all nations that trade between each other trade freely with minor tariffs to cover costs (Yes we need borders). A bonus would be to trade with peoples who do not exploit their lands to a point of ruin and disease.
I understand trade can get complex but if you trade with your neighbors or neighboring tribes and they enslave people, poison their land, and rely on you to consume their products then what are the possible outcomes of these situations?Really, what will eventually happen? Are we all so stupid?
Unfortunately, we have gone beyond the tipping point. Can anyone guess what comes along in the next 10-20 years? Observe your human history and it will not be to hard to figure out.
18 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 27 December 2008:
I should not have said we NEVER had free trade. Actually, the U.S. had something close to free trade from 1846 to 1860. That is why the capitalists had to conquer the South when they got control of the government—to prevent free trade.
Doesn’t the bailout of the financiers, the most egregious swindle in U.S. history, support what I have to say in nos. 2 and 3?
19 Comment by Thomas A. Miller on 27 December 2008:
Daniel Maxwell:
You are a knee-jerk libertarian fanatic. The fact that you have already left at least a half dozen posts on this thread alone in defense of the Free Trade status quo convinces me that you are one of those dogmatic free market zealots whose obsession with “Free Trade” borders on the pathological. One sees the same sort of fanaticism with the reporters and editors of the Wall Street Journal, who are also noted Open Borders enthusiasts. That I should conclude that you share their views on immigration was quite reasonable on my part.
20 Comment by Robert on 27 December 2008:
#18 Yes indeed Mr. Wilson, and there is also always a blanket absolution given for their many sins apparently because of all the good they have done us. examples “It was the right thing to do”, “our ‘intelligence’ was wrong but the world is still a better place today without Hussein, (and presumably those ancient Christian communities that once existed in Iraq) ” Lincoln killed over a million of his own countrymen but remains one of our ‘greatest’ Presidents, and here is recent whopper handed down from above “Traditionalists are led today by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity”, the list is so long as to be a constant refrain of your post above “whatever is a boon to them and a burden to everyone else.”
21 Comment by Bob Johnson on 27 December 2008:
“Doesn’t the bailout of the financiers, the most egregious swindle in U.S. history, support what I have to say in nos. 2 and 3?”
Clyde,
It certainly does support it strongly.
But I really do think that if Sen. McCain had the sense to listen to Rep. Paul on the issue, the vote would’ve went differently.
It would’ve took a Zionist goon death squad lover like McCain to have made it okay for Ron Paul’s colleagues in the house to go against it (there was never an ever loving chance in hell of stopping it in the Senate, for obvious reasons).
22 Comment by Bob Johnson on 27 December 2008:
But in any event, the bailout of the financiers showed us for our good who really runs things in this country.
And it certainly is the northern financiers and their international allies (who shall go nameless on this particular thread).
23 Comment by pablo H on 27 December 2008:
Actually the tariff in 1857 reduced the rate of dutiable goods to about 21%, which is actually higher than the 18% rate in 1931 under Smoot-Hawley. And the rate is 1845 was 35% – so we’re talking about a high rate vs. a very high rate.
BTW, the Civil War cost the North $3 Billion and US Government ended the war $2.5 billion in debt. In 1864 (after the rates had been increased) the revenue from customs was $100 million and by 1870 it wasl only was $200 million.
In 1859 the Customs tax was $50 million or about $10 per year per family (30 million/5= 6 million households). So I doubt keeping the South as a source of tariff revenue was a motivation.
The minimal importance of the tariff is highlighted by fact that the per capita wealth of the USA in 1860 was $500 per person or $2,500 per household vs. the $10 a year tariff tax. While a small minority of financiers may have been motivated by the tariff, no one else was.
24 Comment by Steve Berg on 27 December 2008:
What is truly sad about the free market partisans, is that they resolutely refuse to believe that competition happens only in the marketplace for goods and services. Why should an amoral non-corporeal “person” do so, when it is so much cheaper to gain competitive advantages by dealing in the political marketplace by purchasing judges, juries, legislators and statesmen? For this reason, among others, the free market is an artificial construct that exists only in the imagination. The libertarians’ own Darwinian dogmas are what swiftly destroy their ideal when practice overwhelms faulty theory in the real world.
25 Comment by KMarx on 27 December 2008:
Bob Johnson
“Free Trade is the term Globalists used to sell their ideas to the dull-witted masses.”
Why call them Globalists? They are American Free-For-All Capitalists first, foremost and only. They have been allowed to exploit the world of cheap overseas labor under the guise of a phony belief that some mystical, magical hand guides the market and all will be well. (There is an ‘invisible hand’ alright, it’s called lobbying!) The guise is an easy way for the corrupt in DC to give the green light to those to which they are beholden and yet maintain the facade, for a while at least, that by so doing they are acting in the best interests of the nation.
Yes their intention is to unify the world economically and it’s for their own best interests, not this nation’s. As Clyde Wilson alluded to, unleashed Capitalists are birds of various colors. When the autumn nears they change color as it is in their best interests. When spring arrives they change again. But they are always bird nonetheless.
Pat, thanks again for a great article! As this nation gets hit and hit hard by unbridled Capitalism, perhaps the hoi polloi will smarten up. Maybe then the American people will understand the real meaning of the adage, ‘charity begins in the home’.
26 Comment by KMarx on 27 December 2008:
Steve Berg
“… the free market is an artificial construct that exists only in the imagination.”
Maybe so but this ‘artifical construct’ is actually deconstructing this nation’s economy or as my favorite Economist, Paul Craig Roberts says, “We are dismantling the ladders of upward mobilty in America.” Believe me, I have been on the losing side of this since jackass Bush entered office. At least under the three previous administrations there were still possibilities. Under Bush the ceiling has caved in on many of us, including those of us with a high degree of education and experience. Thanks Georgie boy, you left a mess that will takes years of fix. Now saddle up and get out of town by sundown.
27 Comment by Beau on 27 December 2008:
Bob Johnson wrote: “It’s a very funny thing that Bush asked Americans to die for a country he was working behind the scenes to dissolve.”
Thank you for saying this. I realized several years ago whenever Bush spoke of the United States, he wasn’t talking about the free and independent republic most of us think of but the hub of his daddy’s new world order.
With his oratorical “skills,” after he leaves office, we at least won’t see him popping up on the lecture circuit.
28 Comment by Bob Johnson on 27 December 2008:
KMarx @25 and 26,
Excellent posts.
“Why call them Globalists? They are American Free-For-All Capitalists first, foremost and only.”
Well, that’s where the real power comes from certainly!
I was more talking about their allies in the lower orders, like low paid economists who shill for Free Trade policies that won’t do them (or anyone they know or care about) any goddamned good.
It’s one thing to sell out your countrymen for a money, it’s another thing to sell them out just because you are a complete imbecile like the vast majority of American Economists are.
To me they are the ones who are truly beneath contempt.
29 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 27 December 2008:
#23 Pablo. From 1846–1860 a moderate tariff was used as a source of revenue for the federal govt., a relatively fair tax that eliminated the need for all other taxes. Remember that the capitalists did not regard a national debt as a problem but as (Hamilton’s word: a blessing), from which they did and do profit immensely. The Republicans wanted the tariff AND the debt. They also wanted “free labour,” by which they meant to eliminate slavery and substitute more profitable “free labour” which was cheaper and could be more easily controlled by the threat of unemployment. They also contrived a contract law to encourage cheap labour through foreign immigration. That is, the Republicans are directly responsible for origination of the alien problem. The notion that the Republican protective regime was a boon to American workers is a fantasy. All protection does is shift wealth, it does not produce it. To the extent that American workers were prosperous, which was a very uneven thing during the protectiuonist era, it was because of great natural resources and an inventive and hard-working population. To the Republicans the tariff was less important in statistical terms than that it guaranteed a captive internal market. As they stated plainly at the inauguration of war against the South, they could not allow a free trade region adjacent because it would destroy their profits.
30 Comment by Steve on 27 December 2008:
I keep hearing mentions of unbridled capitalism and that’s just the biggest joke I’ve ever heard. When in the history of this nation have we had “unbridled capitalism”? The government throughout our history has been nothing if not interventionist in economics as it has been interventionist in its foreign policy. The insane ideology of Keynes is being followed to the letter.
Does anyone really think that this unconstitutional bailout will save a failed enterprise? This is the insane pathology that poisons American politics: if it fails, just throw more money at it. And in the meantime, watch the entire rest of the country trip over themselves to get in line at the trough. This is capitalism??
No, this is called fascism.
31 Comment by Invisible Hand on 27 December 2008:
Any form of financial bailout to the big three American automakers will result in financial ruin.
Why?
Just have a look at the current results of the massive bailout to major American financial institutions. Foreclosure rates have reclaimed their downward momentum. Commercial real estate is gaining almost the same turbulence before reaching critical mass.
Protectionism is a pretty word for corporate welfare at the expense of the proletariat to protect the wealthy, avaricious bourgeoisie.
32 Comment by george on 27 December 2008:
Does anyone know where you can view the latest McLaughlin group episodes online?
I wanted to watch the McLaughlin 2008 year end awards but they stopped showing it on CNBC here in the UK and that was only channel that carried it.
33 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 27 December 2008:
30. Steve. You need to look a little deeper. No, we have never had “unbridled capitalism” and I have never asserted that we have. What we have had is state capitalism–a tight collusion between financiers and politicians. Big capitalists have never wanted to be “unbridled” in the entire history of this or any other country. They have wanted an obedient government that minimized risk, uncertainty, and interference and maximized power and profit. Do you think we would have Keynesianism if government spending was not highly profitable for certain interests? And the capitalists have been marvelously successful in portraying any interference with their plans as somehow anti-free market and their own government collusion as high-principled free enterprise. For instance, Mr. Buchanan and others persist in the fallacy that tariffs were responsible for high wages. The free market is a great thing—if we could only get capitalists to practice it.
34 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 27 December 2008:
@19
“You are a knee-jerk libertarian fanatic. The fact that you have already left at least a half dozen posts on this thread alone in defense of the Free Trade status quo convinces me that you are one of those dogmatic free market zealots whose obsession with “Free Trade” borders on the pathological. One sees the same sort of fanaticism with the reporters and editors of the Wall Street Journal, who are also noted Open Borders enthusiasts. That I should conclude that you share their views on immigration was quite reasonable on my part.”
I admit to being a libertarian. No, I do not ‘obsess’ about free trade, especially the false free trade the ‘globalists’ peddle. Dr. Wilson’s replies note that we have only had real free trade starting in the Polk administration up until 1860. Of course, then the South tried to escape this, among other issues, and practice what amounted to free trade, and they were crushed for it. I do not read the WSJ. However, note that people are not goods. I am not an ‘open borders fanatic’.
35 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 27 December 2008:
Dr Wilson @ 32
I hope to see you will write an essay on the history of the tariffs for Chronicles that cuts through the myths that Buchanan and others spread.
36 Comment by KMarx on 27 December 2008:
Bob Johnson # 28
Amen to what you said!
37 Comment by pablo H on 28 December 2008:
Dr. Wilson, thanks for the response. However, this statement confuses me:
“They also wanted “free labour,” by which they meant to eliminate slavery and substitute more profitable “free labour” which was cheaper and could be more easily controlled by the threat of unemployment. They also contrived a contract law to encourage cheap labour through foreign immigration. That is, the Republicans are directly responsible for origination of the alien problem.”
Are you attacking the motives of the Republicans in opposing the expansion of slavery and the use of free labor or supporting slavery? I assume you’re simply attacking the self-righteous moralism of the abolitionist capitalist,
But obviously free labor is superior to slave labor. And by superior I mean both to the economically and morally. I also think that 19th century immigration was different than that of the 20th century. The vast majority of immigrants were hard-working Europeans and Britons and we had an empty continent to fill. We also needed strength of numbers.
38 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 28 December 2008:
Before and during The War it was commonplace for Northern capitalists to say they wanted to abolish slavery because they believed it was less profitable than free labour. They understood that slavery as practiced in the Old South involved lifetime welfare of the workers, while “free labour” could be bought with wages and disposed of easily. Many of those Republicans stole Southern plantations and thought they would get rich quick growing cotton with “free labour.” They were disappointed.
The Republicans of Lincoln’s time passed a Contract Law which allowed manufacturers to bring in gangs of impoverished European workers—the obvious consequence being to bring down the wages of native born workers. Immigrant workers were needed, then as now, only because they were cheaper for certain interests. Without such immigrants the labour of free American workers would have been more valuable and we would today have a smaller and much more prosperous and free population. (Of course, not all immigrants fit that category.)
39 Comment by MAP on 29 December 2008:
The immense profitability of “free labor” over slave labor is easy to see. Since it is free it requires no investment. Nor does there have to be any consideration beyond production and profit. If the employee starves, is unclothed, or homeless, it is of no concern. If he becomes ill or dies, he is merely replaced. It is no wonder that dangerous jobs in the old South were done by free labor. Slaves were too valuable to risk. In England, the mother of industrialism, children as young as six were removed from the orphanages and put to the most brutal labor in the factories. Many died; others committed suicide. Human life truly looses all value under such a system of labor and profit.
40 Comment by Irving Babbitt on 30 December 2008:
#31
You should be able to see or at least hear the McLaughlin Group at the website listed below.
http://www.mclaughlin.com/
41 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 30 December 2008:
Dr. Wilson, do you believe that slavery would have died a natural death in the course of time, without the political agitation of abolitionists, Northern capitalists, and the subsequent war? I have always believed that it certainly would have been gone by 1885, but I would like to hear your opinion.
42 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 30 December 2008:
I think there is no doubt that the institution of domestic servitude in the South was and had been evolving into something better.
It would have evolved even faster except for the fanaticism of the abolitionists, a point which Daniel Webster, another great man of the North, made emphatically clear in the debates over the Compromise of 1850, asking his fellow Northerners for restraint and justice to their Southern fellow countrymen. Had the South won its independence, this evolution would have continued even faster, and with good will, since the overwhelming trend of conditions and opinion of the Confederate leaders was committed to this. Historians who are honest and really know the times in some depth will recognise the truth of this, although those motivated by irrational hatred of Southerners will deny it Instead of evolution we had the horrors of emancipation by violence and in bad faith. Even that did not destroy the good faith between blacks and whites in the South—but Reconstruction, in which outsiders used the black people as a tool to dominate and rob the white South, did.
43 Comment by george on 30 December 2008:
@40Joseph Salemi
I thought the real reason behind slavery being abolished was because black slaves were starting to outnumber native whites in parts of the South and they feared there would be Zimbabwe style retribution against the native white population.
Anyone saw the film the Confederate States of America?
It is an alternative fictionalised take on US history if Lincoln had lost and the Confederacy had won.
44 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 31 December 2008:
#42. This is nonsense. Blacks have been a majority of the population in a large part of the South from early colonial times until the present day. There has never been the least concern with what you suggest. There was never any problem except that instigated by outside attack. The film you refer to is Afro-centric propaganda. There was not even any fear of insurrection during The War when most of the white men were at the front.
The worst that happened was that the able-bodied blacks were carried off by the Yankees or ran away. Something approaching that happened in Reconstruction, entirely at the instigation of Yankees for their own evil motives. It is better to see American history from actual knowledge of the context rather than from fictional fantasies based on present assumptions and idelogies.
45 Comment by MAP on 31 December 2008:
Our local South Georgia newspaper has a section everyday that lists the historical events that occurred on the date. NEVER is there any mention of the events during Lincoln’s war or Reconstruction. Sixteen years of history are silenced, forgotten. Granted the paper is one of a Yankee chain, but why are sixteen years of history missing? From almost the founding, two different views of the Union prevailed. What is happening is an attempt to completely obliterate one side of that debate. Slavery serves as one of the tools to accomplish that. Truth and facts are poisons and are avoided. Alas, our age appears devoid of any honor. If memory serves me, George Mason and Patrick Henry (to name only two) were opposed to the Constitution being ratified as they believed it would be used by the North to subjugate the South. Too bad they were not heeded.
46 Comment by J Meng on 31 December 2008:
Dr. Wilson @ 43 & MAP @ 44,
Although I was not born in the South, unless you grant me some affiliation by being born in Southern California, I have known for a very long time from my study of history, that the War between the States was over the issue of whether or not a State could secede from the Union established in 1787. Personally, my sympathies have fallen on the side of the South, primarily, because there is nothing in the Constitution against it, and because the North was economically raping the South, especially, with its tariffs. Slavery did not become an issue until 1862, I believe, after the Battle of Antietam (correct me if I am wrong). Of course, Lincoln worked it to the bone. Many, many Americans believe the war was fought to free the slaves, thanks to MSM and politically-correct textbooks from politically-correct book publishers.
Still, as you know from other threads, I am against chattel slavery, but that does not blind me to the truth of what the South fought for.