Posted on 11/29/2002 7:57:37 AM PST by End The Hypocrisy
Three MAJOR civil war cinema epics are due in 2003. 1) Robert Duvall plays Robert E. Lee in Gods & Generals, out Feb. 21; 2) Jude Law portrays a jaded confederate in Cold Mountain, due Dec. 25, 2003; and 3) Tom Cruise plays a Civil War veteran who witnesses the end of a Japanese culture in The Last Samurai, due Dec. 12, 2003. Gods & Generals is replete with special effects, although director Maxwell still used more than 10,000 extras to re-create battle scenes.
(Excerpt) Read more at usatoday.com ...
You miss interpret my comments.
I'm stating that using manual labor is the MOST expensive means of producing a crop - any crop. Platation owners were business men, greedy men. Argueably some of the most greedy ever as they earned their profits off the work and efforts of others - without compensating them for those efforts.
However, if there were a less expensive means of producing the crops, there is no doubt in my mind that plantations owners would have moved to reduce their slave holdings. Simply because it would have been expensive to maintain slaves.
Understand they would not have done so out of any charity, simple economics would have ruled the day. Given a choice between more expensive manual labor or less expensive machinery, farmers always have and always will choose the less expensive option.
Yes, and adding all tarrifs together without consideration of the source (Southern / Northern / English / etc) is of little use. In fact since tariffs are applied to good brought IN, I could also make the arguement that such figures shows a greater tariff burden on southern goods as the tariffs were collected at northern ports.
It is much like saying that NY pays more taxes than Florida. While a statement of fact, is of little use for understanding who pays a greater portion of the tax burden.
However, consider as Charles Adams (noted scholar and writer on the history of taxation) notes, the South paid an undue proportion of federal revenues derived from tariffs, and these were expended by the federal government more in the North than the South:
In 1840, the South paid 84% of the tariffs, rising to 87% in 1860. They paid 83% of the $13 million federal fishing bounties paid to New England fishermen, and also paid $35 million to Northern shipping interests which had a monopoly on shipping from Southern ports. The South, in effect, was paying tribute to the North.
Also, perhaps you could comment on the Morill tariffs? For some background: The Republican platform of 1860 called for higher tariffs; that was implemented by the new Congress in the Morill tariff of March 1861, signed by President Buchanan before Lincoln took the oath of office. It imposed the highest tariffs in US history, with over a 50% duty on iron products and 25% on clothing; rates averaged 47%. The nascent Confederacy followed with a low tariff, essentially creating a free-trade zone in the South. Prior to this "war of the tariffs", most Northern newspapers had called for peace through conciliation, but many now cried for war.
And as long as we are quoting, here are a few in support of my position:
Charles Dickens in a London periodical in December 1861, "Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils....The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel".
As the North American Review (Boston October 1862) put it: "Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation".
An editorial in the Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election stated: "The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism."
The Philadelphia Press on 18 March 1861 demanded a blockade of Southern ports, because, if not, "a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper. Finally, the great inland waterways, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio Rivers, will be subject to Southern tolls."
My statement was that the VAST majority of southerns did not own slaves. While perhaps a bit hyperbolic, I do not consider it perposterous. Primarily because the statictics you quote make my point.
Another way to look at this statictics is that:
Only two states were even CLOSE to 1 out of 2 owning slaves.
The next three were closer to 1 out of 3
And the majority were closer to 1 out of 4 with some states being closer being to 1 out of 10.
Please see http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/stat.html for a breakdown of the census data.
Consider that if the Republicans held the senate today with 2 out of 3 (non slave owners in all but two states), the press would be HOWLING about the VAST Republican .......
At the very least, we can agree that the MAJORITY of southerners did not own slaves. Even if we can't agree on the word VAST.
Nice try, but the laws of economics are not "bombastic opinions." Your rantings completely neglect how the economy works, hence I may discard them as flawed.
I have no doubt that Noam McPherson and all the other marxist wackos out there who have not the slightest clue about how an economy works would agree with you, but the simple fact of the matter is that both you and them are, by way of economic trade functions, wrong.
And as you well know, southern congressmen made the tariffs --exactly-- what they wanted them to be. By keeping the federal government strapped for cash, they made revolution and rebellion more attainable.
You truly are a left wing nut, Walt, and the little economic "theory" you post above, if it can even be called that, proves it so! Sorry, but tax hikes are not the answer to every government budget need. Despite what your Democrat heroes may say, a country cannot keep hiking taxes indefinately and expect it to fund government's every spending want. The virtue of low taxes is found in the free market conditions they create and the restraint pressure they place against government interventionism. Low tariffs worked well in securing both.
As for 1860 the government wasn't "strapped for cash" due to low tariff rates. It was experiencing its budget shortfall in the wake of a recession caused not by tariffs but by shifts in the world markets incited by the conclusion of the Crimean War.
You're citing nothing but branch and affiliate groups off of Morris Dees' website of all places (thanks for showing your true colors, BTW)!
Nobody's disputing the existence of state chapters, divisions, and whatever other goofy names they give themselves across the nation, but the location generally recognized by federal monitors to be the group's national headquarters is a compound in Indiana belonging to the National Knights of the KKK. It is thought to be the largest hotbed of their activity and the central base of their leadership operations. Last I checked Indiana was deep in the heart of yankeeland. Tolerance.org identified 109 separate Klan chapters in the U.S. and over 70% of those were located down south. And they all seem to have an affinity for that confederate flag of yours. I wonder why? Tradition, do you suppose?
If those mathematics are properly calculated as a matter of economics, it can be fairly simple. But throwing numbers out there and making a guess in the wind about them meaning something as you do is not economics.
The claim has been made that the south paid 87% of the tariff revenue. That would seem to me that they would have had to consume either 87% of the actual imports or 87% of the output of the industries that the tariffs protected.
And that is your error. Economic costs are not measured in strict simplistic incurred purchases at the point of revenue collection. Tariffs shift the whole price scheme around, which is where the costs of a tariff are incurred.
And both those figures are ridiculous.
If that is what you believe, make your case by way of economic trade analysis. Post the numbers and graph it out. Then calculate the area of the cost segment and assign it. You have not done so yet. Simply throwing out incomplete statistics you do not understand and calling them economic analysis does not make it so.
I was speaking of the 30 year conspiracy by the slave power to destroy the Union.
"The secession of South Carolina," said one of the chief actors, "is not an event of a day. It is not anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for thirty years." This with many similar avowals, crowns and completes the otherwise abundant proof that the revolt was not only aganist right, but that it was without cause."
--John G. Nicolay, 1881
Walt
Oh. Right. The conspiracy...well you should've said so...er...oops! I've said too much...the secret's out now!
As to whether slaveowners would replace slaves with machinery if it were less expensive, that seems to be almost a given. One likely conclusion is that slavery would have persisted until the 1930s or 1940s when mechanical cottonpickers became practical and affordable.
My goodness, billbears, have I managed to get on a nerve here? Why else would you be so definsive about the Klan and be spouting nonsense like 'all the HQs are located in northern states'? OK, here's the link. Yeah, it's from the tolerance.org website, an SPLC offshoot. And yeah, they may play fast and loose sometimes with the 'hate group' designation. But I doubt that you will disagree with their classification of the Klan as a hate group. And they have identified 109 separate chapters, over 2/3rds of which are located in the old confederacy. And almost none of which are headquartered up North, billbears. Now if you have any evidence contradicting the stuff on the website then by all means trot it out. I would love to see it.
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