[ProtectOurFreedom]

" In the end, each black in the US owes non-blacks slightly over $640,000."

There was an article yesterday that made that exact point. If the slaves had stayed in Africa, their descendants alive today would have an average life expectancy of 30 years and many would die in unsafe, unsanitary conditions or by the warlords.

Not only that, but many of them would have been sold into slavery by the muslim slave traders in North Africa and the Middle East. So their life of indentured servitude would have been the same in either case.

I keep waiting for people to go after the AFRICAN slave traders who sold their countrymen into slavery in the first place.

[fhayek]

I have always maintained, had it not been for the slavery, most African Americans would not even exist. If, for whatever quirk of history, one of your great great grandfathers never met your great great grandmother, you would not exist. It wouldn't mean that you would have red hair instead of brown. It would mean that your great great grandfather would have had different children (if any) with a different woman. Those children, very likely, would not have paired with your eventual great grandparent and so on.

What I am trying to say is that blacks in America owe their very existence to the atrocity of slavery. How much is your existence worth?

And just for the record, everyone owes their existence to an incalculable number of historical atrocities. Everyone today is alive because of wars, and rapes, and slavery. Not to mention the effects of famine and disease.

[econjack]

The book Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (both are Nobel Laureates in Economics) have a two volume book that proves the slaves were better off in economic terms as slaves than freemen. The biggest contributor to this was that in the Antebellum South they were treated as assets and provided with food, clothing, shelter, and especially, health care.