On Wed, 01 Jul 2015 08:49:55 -0700, Rudy Canoza
wrote:

On 7/1/2015 8:03 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Wed, 01 Jul 2015 07:49:35 -0700, Rudy Canoza
wrote:

On 7/1/2015 4:40 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Wed, 01 Jul 2015 18:16:31 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015 19:41:42 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:

On Wed, 01 Jul 2015 08:16:03 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015 04:35:42 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:


http://www.vice.com/read/hey-v12n5

An interesting article. Of course the first line in the article says
that it is for people in "elementary school" which, in the U.S. seems
to be the first 4 grads in the school system. the Wiki says for
children between the ages of 4 - 11.

Which apparently says something about either your reading, or
comprehensive, ability.

--
cheers,

John B.

I posted it because we have Leftists here and we all know that they
are dummer than dirt. Now do you have a problem with the Contents of
the article..or are you simply bitching because it explained things so
the Leftist could understand it?

Hummm?

Gunner

No, I didn't spend a lot of time studying the article, but it seemed
to say that at various times slavery has been a part of almost every
society, which, of course, is true. After winning the Battle of
Alesia, September, 52 BC, Julius Caesar gave each soldier in his army
one of the captured as a slave. This amounted to something like forty
thousand slaves.... from a single campaign. In his eight years of
campaigning against the Gaul's, he was said to have enslaved more than
a million people.

What the article seemed to ignore was that in nearly every society
slavery died out primarily because slaves, while cost effective in a
purely agricultural environment are somewhat less efficient when the
society becomes less dependent on agriculture and begins to depend
more on machinery.

That's not what happened in the US, however. Slavery died out because
the federal government prevented westward expansion of slavery, which
provoked a war that led to the outlawing of slavery.

Not quite; continued...

Federal resistance to expansion of slavery limited the growth of
cotton agriculture. In fact, it guarenteed that it would become less
profitable, because cotton wears the hell out of the soil, and
southern plantations were already beginning to lose productivity.

It was not the federal government that prevented westward expansion of
slavery, it was federal electoral politics.

Uh...Ok. g

Dismiss it if you wish, but it's an important point. If the south had
had greater representation in Congress, slavery would have expanded.

Well, sure. But they didn't, and it didn't.


And, contrary to John's
statement, it was the development of new machinery - the cotton gin -
that *strengthened* the institution of slavery in the south, as it made
inferior land profitable in the cultivation of cotton. It is a
commonplace of American history classes that slavery was declining in
the south before the cotton gin came into widespread use. Of course,
later mechanization in the form of harvesting machinery almost certainly
would have reduced the demand for slaves.

But the harvesting machinery didn't come along until 1944. Picking
cotton was a holdout on mechanization.

I understand that. I'm only saying that earlier mechanization increased
the demand for slaves, while later mechanization almost certainly would
have eliminated it.

Right, that's accurate.

We've diverted a bit from the riginal point here, which was that a
common way that slavery ends in most countries is through economic or
technical evolotion that makes slavery uneconomic. That isn't what
happened in the US. It was economically attractive as hell, and would
have remained that way for nearly a century if it wasn't for the civil
war. That is, if the cotton market held up and we didn't run out of
arable land.

--
Ed Huntress