Maybe it wasn't, but moving 230 million dollars worth of import money from New York directly to the South would have capitalized other industries in the South.
Really, a mess was building in the South and it's hard to see why the Middle West would want to join up with that.
For the same reason why Americans are spending their money making China rich. Because they would be able to deliver lower cost products.
The country might have broken up further in the 1860s and it still might break up, but Ohio wasn't going to join South Carolina then any more than Idaho would stay in one country with Mississippi. They're just too different.
I wouldn't pick Ohio as one of the examples, but certainly Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas would likely have come into the Confederacy's economic orbit eventually. If the South could supply goods cheaper than the New York/Chicago axis, then they settlers in those states would have bought them.
You think that rich and powerful people are oppressing you ...
I think Rich and Powerful people have their meddling fingers in the Government, and it is the government who is oppressing us. I think the New York media is liberal precisely because it benefits the bottom line of the Rich-Powerful/Government axis. I am referring to this loose oligarchy which people are nowadays calling "the establishment."
... and they need to be overthrown and that those who overthrow them will become in turn rich and powerful and universally loved.
No, I think their media weapon needs to be taken away from them, and that we need to come up with a system to guarantee the Conservative side of the debate has at least equal access to the trillion dollar broadcasting infrastructure which the left has long used to exclusively communicate with the public.
I think that any concentration of power is prone to abuse and corruption, and as the founders realized, the only thing that can be done is to try and balance opposing forces in an effort to create an altruistic outcome.
Well, just overthrowing somebody else doesn't make people rich.
You must not have read up on any of the communist revolutions. Overthrowing the existing system *always* makes the new rulers wealthy.
And if you do succeed in replacing the others and becoming rich yourself, why wouldn't people like you hate the people you've become just as much as they hated the people you replaced?
Okay, you've gone off the rails here. I'm not motivated by envy, i'm actually doing quite well financially, and there's really nothing I want that I can't buy if I wished it. I simply recognize that there is a structure in Washington/New York that has resisted any effort to rein in excessive spending. For a long time I thought it was a quesiton of ignorance, but after all the media screeching in 1995 about efforts to balance the budget, I became convinced that the people these media represent really don't want spending in Washington under control.
So I eventually started asking myself "Why?"
The only answer that made sense to me was "Because their power and wealth are tied to excessive spending by Washington D.C."
The realization that this shadow government we now call "the establishment" was a consequence of the Civil War, only occurred to me within the last year and a half. Now the more I look at it, the more this idea seems to ring true. In other words, you dream of overthrowing New York and making New Orleans or Charleston the new New York and you actually think they won't be resented as much as you resent New York.
I'd rather not be ruled by any group of oligarchs. I'd rather they were made to keep their meddling little fingers out of the workings of government and leave it as the minimalist system which our founders designed it to be.
What I said earlier, and which you seem to be misunderstanding, is that had Charleston managed to become the Money Capital of the US, I would likely be bitching about how the Charleston "elite" were tampering with our government and our lives. My meaning here is that I don't want a group of "elite" telling me what to do, regardless of what city from which they might originate.
Really, it's all there -- economic determinism, resentment, exploitation, class struggle, revolution, utopia. Why do you get so bent out of shape when people point out how much of a Marxist you are, Diogenes?
Perhaps it is because they keep insisting they need to put a Marxist shoe on my capitalist foot? That actually gets old pretty fast.
I'm all for capitalism, so long as it is Adam Smith/Edmund Burke style capitalism. It is the corrupt, monopolistic, influential, coercive, crony sort, that i'm against.
In your crazy fantasy world where free trade makes the Confederacy some magical source of cheap British goods, maybe. In the real world that wouldn't happen and even if it did, the regions and their societies were too different.
Look, you really contradict yourself. If the South became a great economic powerhouse, the same people who resented the East would resent the South. You've even said you'd do the same. So, please, for once take a good look at the contradictions in your theory.
>>Well, just overthrowing somebody else doesn't make people rich.
> You must not have read up on any of the communist revolutions. Overthrowing the existing system *always* makes the new rulers wealthy.
I'm talking about countries and large populations. A country or a region or class doesn't automatically become rich by throwing off the people or the government it labels "exploiters." It has to have the know-how and ability and put in a real effort to become wealthy.
What I said earlier, and which you seem to be misunderstanding, is that had Charleston managed to become the Money Capital of the US, I would likely be bitching about how the Charleston "elite" were tampering with our government and our lives. My meaning here is that I don't want a group of "elite" telling me what to do, regardless of what city from which they might originate.
If I'm "misunderstanding" you it's because you get so enthusiastic about the idea of Charleston or some other Southern city displacing New York. Sometimes it seems like it's all you ever talk about.
Good luck getting rid of elites. Name a society that didn't have them. Or cronyism for that matter.
Just for sake of argument, let's accept the $230 million figure, and first note that even DiogenesLamp only claims 40% was spent on those wicked Northern "power brokers".
So 40% of $230 million is $92 million which in DiogenesLamp's fantasies gets transferred, in one great sum, not to Confederate States in general, but specifically to Charleston, SC.
And this $92 million pumped into Charleston will make it the New, New York of the South!
Well...
So how much was $92 million in 1860?
Was it a lot of money?
Yes, sure it was, in today's equivalents, about $360 billion, or 2% of the total US economic GDP.
So, 2% is a lot of money, but not really -- for example the U.S. stock market can go up or down that much in a typical month, and real estate prices in a few months.
In 1860, GDP itself typically grew 8% or 10% per year, so 2% represented economic growth in maybe three months.
In short, a 2% transfer of overall GDP from New York to Charleston would be a pretty big deal, but far from existential to even New York, much less to the overall US economy.
So, once again, DiogenesLamp's phantom ship of potential Confederate economic power founders on the rocks of reality: In the 1860 the $4.5 billion US GDP economy enjoyed the benefits of *maybe* $230 million in "Southern exports", but was far from dependent on them.