Posted on 04/08/2018 3:39:59 PM PDT by iowamark
A friend recently posed this question: “If you had to recommend one book for a first-time visitor to the U.S. to read, to understand our country, what would it be and why?”...
If the goal is an education, we could recommend Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s Growth of the American Republic, a two-volume history that used to be required reading...
Huckleberry Finn may be the greatest American novel... But there is no single novel, no matter how great, that can do the job alone.
Consider instead the great American essayists who invented a new style of writing in the 1920s and founded The New Yorker. E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat is the finest such essay collection... Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel is nearly as great...
Teddy Roosevelt’s short book The Strenuous Life, which opens with his 1899 speech by that name, is an explanation of America’s view of itself — a view that greatly shaped the 20th century. It was the peculiar marriage of power and prosperity together with a sense of moral urgency. Roosevelt demands an active life, a life of struggling for personal and national virtue. He commends a triad of strength in body, intellect, and character — of which character is the most important. America must meet its moral obligations vigorously, he tells us: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”...
The origin of that moral urgency was America’s most important spiritual crisis. It is best expressed in a single speech, rich in Biblical imagery and contemporary prophecy: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which is the greatest of all American writing. It is a tone-poem or photograph of the American soul. A complete understanding, in just 697 words.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
That is just stupid on the face of it.
The "mundane historical fact" is that had the South been left alone, the North was going to lose a whole lot of money and power.
Easily sufficient motive to start a war to prevent it.
“Imports are payment for exports. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? They must be roughly equal over time. ”
Have you told the Chinese that?
This modern day business of running colossal trade deficits did not occur back in the 1860 era. (Not before the war anyway.) In those days, people weren't playing these money games they do now.
I'm surprised I had to tell you that, but then again, you are having a hard time grasping this "exports pay for imports" concept.
I think it would have made profit. It would have been a net gain, instead of a net loss. Well, a net gain for the Southern companies anyway.
DegenerateLamp feeeeeeeeeeeels that it is somehow a dollar~for~dollar zero-sum game. Those of us who have dealt with him for a while understand his infirmity.
Can you enlighten me on how the Shipping Act of 1817 caused a northern monopoly on hauling southern goods? The only information I can find is that the legislation required American or West Indies owned ships were required to move between US ports.
Didn't amount to much. Northern states refused to accept their rulings that they didn't like.
Besides that, the Supreme court couldn't create laws out of thin air back in those days. It was a lot less powerful then than it is now.
With a bunch of searching, I can find the relevant discussions about this for you, and I will look around for them, but i'm not going to be in a hurry about it. I think the matter was discussed quite a lot in that long thread, the link to which I have already posted for you.
I can tell you this much from memory. Federal payments to Northern Shipping companies for carrying the US Mail, gave them a competitive advantage against shippers located anywhere else.
And this is how you still feel some attachment to the discussion.
It’s way past a discussion - you and the other troll keep trotting out the same tired crap. Look at your last post - you don’t even know what you’re spouting off about so you’re gonna go dredge up some inanity from long ago and parrot it onto this thread.
You’re a loser.
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2491.pdf
Within the chapter titled Balance of Payments 1790 to 1860, on page ten of the PDF, there is a chart showing detailed figures from 1820 to 1860. Since this period more closely aligns with our period of political friction, I have used those years for this post, and left out the time between the post Revolution era to the War of 1812 and it aftermath, which would unfairly exacerbate the deficit.
The imbalance of merchandise bought and sold totaled a deficit of $715.3 million dollars. In only eleven of those years was there any trade surplus, with only three of those years reporting more than single digit surpluses.
How do you explain that?
We had positive cash flow in Specie and in Services, and we come out that year in the positive. 7.3 Million to the good.
The numbers are roughly equal. Did you expect them to be absolutely perfectly equal year after year?
They go up, they go down, but over time, they are roughly equal.
The imbalance of merchandise bought and sold totaled a deficit of $715.3 million dollars.
I don't see where you got that number. The Chart you showed says our indebtedness was 379.2 million dollars in 1860. That represents a little more than a years worth of trade value collectively for 40 years worth of trading.
It works out to a trade deficit of .98 million deficit each year, which is not a large percentage of the total trade.
To make your point that export value and import value must be regarded as different, you have to show a lot worse trade deficits than this. We were running a long term trade deficit, but on a year to year basis it wasn't very much.
This looks to me like an attempt to deliberately get the discussion into the weeds where the complexities of accounting for all the pennies allow you to ignore the larger reality that the South was producing most of the Trade with Europe, and that the North was going to lose a huge amount of money if they allowed the South to be free of them.
In your post 417 you write:
“Imports are payment for exports. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? They must be roughly equal over time.”
I researched the numbers, and this was not the case. The aggregate imbalance between 1790 and 1860 was $379.2 million, worth about $10.5 billion today.
By adding the accounting for merchandise traded between 1820 and 1860, I arrived at the figure of $715.3 million more goods imported than exported. The total trade imbalance for that same period shows a total deficit of $275.70, worth about $7.64 billion today.
On what basis can you call these “roughly equal.”
On the basis that your number is a small percentage of the total trade. How about you add up the total trade? Go look on page 34.
I dare say that when you have totaled up all the trade between 1820 and 1860, you will discover your number (which I still don't see how you got) is a small percentage of the total.
And I now marvel at your willingness to go to all this trouble to ignore the fact that the South produced the vast majority of all Trade income for the US, while trying to salvage what you wish to believe by attempting to see if you could get the statistics to lie on your behalf.
I dare say you didn't even know the South was producing the vast majority of export income until I informed you of it. You still do not want to believe it, because it make my argument that the North attacked the South to prevent Trade competition, uncomfortably close to proven for your taste.
You were the one who made the claim that exports and imports must balance, and that large trade deficits didn’t not exist in the antebellum era. The figures in this document disproves both notions.
I got these numbers from the chart. If you look at the aggregate figure for total trade deficit, found on the right hand side for 1860, the number is $379.2 million dollars. That is $10.5 billion in today’s dollars. Dividing that figure of $379.2 million by forty years is $9,450,000 per year, or $242.44 million in today’s dollars.
Last year we had a trade deficit of about $568.4 billion with a population of 330 million, or about $17.2 million per person. In 1859 the trade deficit was $26.2 million with a population of about 30 million, or about $877,333 per person. This is the equivalent of about $24.2 million per person today.
How are you going to deny that these numbers clearly refute all your earlier claims? How are you going to spin the fact that there was no balance of imports and exports to sustain your claim that Southerners paid the bulk of the tariffs prior to the Civil War?
That should have read “did not exist in the antebellum era.”
Which is what percentage of the total trade? The only thing I asked you to do, you didn't do.
Add up all the numbers for "exports" on page 34, and then tell me what percentage of that total trade value is your 379 million.
If you are going to say we had a 379 million dollar deficit for 40 years, you are going to have to assert what percentage of the total trade this constitutes.
When all is said and done, I believe you will find it comes out to less than 10% of the total trade, which means my point about import and export values being approximately equal holds true.
You are trying to use a deceitful tactic of comparing 40 years worth of deficits without comparing it to 40 years worth of trade.
Okay, 65 % is the highest number i've seen from you so far. 73% is only another 8%, and perhaps you will get there eventually. Then we'll work on getting you to the 84% that other people claim was the true value of the South's exports.
How is it deceitful? It clearly shows that your assumptions on accounting for tariffs paid are flawed. Constant ongoing deficits are not “roughly equal.” Remember when you said that GNP was irrelevant because the point was tariffs paid? Well, your question about the percentage of deficits to total import/export trade is irrelevant because the conversation is about determining who was paying for tariffs.
YOU set the standard that exporters were also paying tariffs, because they had to balance. Ten million dollars per year paid for imports did NOT come from exports. That’s over $200 million today. Where did it come from?
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