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Will people never learn they should not give likes to slaves?
View attachment 520109 Have they never heard the adage "parels voor de zwijnen (pearls for the swines)"?

Nevertheless congratulations, Eul! :clapping:

You will get better results from a modicum of praise rather than from continual blame and denegration. Was there not a recent discussion on just this subject with regard to slavery?
I am sure that the Nazi factories staffed by starving slaves produced a lot of shoddy work.:p
 
One the subject of religion how about this from the "Perishers" cartoon strip in the Daily Mirror.

The Perishers – “Eyeballs in the Sky”

To one small group of characters, Boot is even more than human. Each year on his holidays, while the children swim, he strolls along the beach, peering into rock pools.
upload_2017-8-5_11-48-56.png

Unknown to Boot, the crabs in one particular pool have constructed an entire religion around his annual appearance. It is not an attractive creed; its adherents are always ready to panic, to divide into warring factions, and to make bad puns (the example quoted, "In times like these we should think ourselves lucky to have a woof over our heads", is one of the better ones).
 
The Perishers – “Eyeballs in the Sky”
Crabs are very intelligent beings. They do not differ much from humans (except that they have more legs).

Our Woof, whose eyeballs are over our heads
Hallowed be thy name;
Thy dogdom come,
Thy will be done,
In this pool as it is in thy doghouse.
Give us this day our daily plakton,
etc. :amen:

but a grindslave fed on beans produces excellent coffee (advt) :p
Like you say: "fed on beans".
Grindslaves are not starving.
 
You will get better results from a modicum of praise rather than from continual blame and denegration. Was there not a recent discussion on just this subject with regard to slavery?
I am sure that the Nazi factories staffed by starving slaves produced a lot of shoddy work.:p

I've probably mentioned this on another thread, but Edward Baptist in his book about slavery in the Southern US, "The Half Has Never Been Told" shows data suggesting that per acre cotton productivity under slavery was very high, higher than under the post-Civil War system of sharecropping. It was exceeded only in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of mechanization and modern fertilizers and pesticides. That of course is NOT a justification of slavery. His book disputes the contention that slavery was failing under its own weight before the Civil War.
 
I've probably mentioned this on another thread, but Edward Baptist in his book about slavery in the Southern US, "The Half Has Never Been Told" shows data suggesting that per acre cotton productivity under slavery was very high, higher than under the post-Civil War system of sharecropping. It was exceeded only in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of mechanization and modern fertilizers and pesticides. That of course is NOT a justification of slavery. His book disputes the contention that slavery was failing under its own weight before the Civil War.
Slavery (except here at the forum:D) would have collapsed with mechanization. Slaves, like mules, are not cheap to own and maintain. Another wrong but widely held belief is all Southerners owned slave when it was truly a very small percent. Most slaves were treated far better than depicted because as stated they were cheap...
 
I've probably mentioned this on another thread, but Edward Baptist in his book about slavery in the Southern US, "The Half Has Never Been Told" shows data suggesting that per acre cotton productivity under slavery was very high, higher than under the post-Civil War system of sharecropping. It was exceeded only in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of mechanization and modern fertilizers and pesticides. That of course is NOT a justification of slavery. His book disputes the contention that slavery was failing under its own weight before the Civil War.
Slavery (except here at the forum:D) would have collapsed with mechanization. Slaves, like mules, are not cheap to own and maintain. Another wrong but widely held belief is all Southerners owned slave when it was truly a very small percent. Most slaves were treated far better than depicted because as stated they were cheap...

The problem for the American South was its economical model was a bad one, it was dependent on a cash crop which always leaves one a hostage to fortune, can anyone say boll weevil? Even without something like that though you have the potential for somewhere else to get better at growing or delivering the same crop for less in the future. What slavery does is lock in labour, the slaves might be expensive but the issue is they are not free to head after the best wages and an owner who keeps the entire product of a worker minus cheap food and cheaper board is unlikely to be willing to give that up for any lesser amount.

That was why the North kept on growing faster. People could find jobs that would feed their families and then look to take a leg up when a more productive industry offering higher wages came along and this happened time and time again generation after generation. The Southern planation owner might sneer as another of his Northern cousins went bankrupt but he failed to note that the other three to four new entrepreneurs who were making even more money than him. Thus it seemed axiomatic that without them the Union would collapse and so a rebellion in defence of slavery would surely work. Only they very quickly found that while the North was stretched by the needs of war the South started cracking from the get go and stunning victories could only hide so long that each new Northern army was slightly bigger and after a while there were no more men to refill the Southern ranks unless they dared arm the very slaves they lived in terror of.
 
The problem for the American South was its economical model was a bad one, it was dependent on a cash crop which always leaves one a hostage to fortune, can anyone say boll weevil? Even without something like that though you have the potential for somewhere else to get better at growing or delivering the same crop for less in the future. What slavery does is lock in labour, the slaves might be expensive but the issue is they are not free to head after the best wages and an owner who keeps the entire product of a worker minus cheap food and cheaper board is unlikely to be willing to give that up for any lesser amount.

That was why the North kept on growing faster. People could find jobs that would feed their families and then look to take a leg up when a more productive industry offering higher wages came along and this happened time and time again generation after generation. The Southern planation owner might sneer as another of his Northern cousins went bankrupt but he failed to note that the other three to four new entrepreneurs who were making even more money than him. Thus it seemed axiomatic that without them the Union would collapse and so a rebellion in defence of slavery would surely work. Only they very quickly found that while the North was stretched by the needs of war the South started cracking from the get go and stunning victories could only hide so long that each new Northern army was slightly bigger and after a while there were no more men to refill the Southern ranks unless they dared arm the very slaves they lived in terror of.
All true. And while 'slavery' in name does not exist in the US in this day many illegal aliens are treated much the same as the slaves were!
 
There is another factor too. The export staple crop of the South required massive labor inputs over extended periods of time. Whereas the grain and livestock mixed farming of the North could largely be handled by family labor and seasonal hiring of paid labor. This is another reason why Northerners could not fathom the South's reliance on slavery, and why Southern planters (a minority as Tree points out, but the backbone of the economy nonetheless) would have faced ruin under any other labor system.
 
'From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.' Adam Smith I.8.40

He accepted that the high profits of tobacco and sugar plantations, and the shortage of free labour, disguised the long-term disadvantages of slave labour, and the same probably applied to cotton plantations too. So, from Smith's point of view, the plantations weren't profitable because they used slave labour, it was the other way about, they went on using slave labour because they were profitable enough and didn't see any need to change. One can think of parallels in the failure to invest in technology and skills in industries in Western countries in more recent times, 'we're turning a good profit, why bother?'
 
'From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.' Adam Smith I.8.40

He accepted that the high profits of tobacco and sugar plantations, and the shortage of free labour, disguised the long-term disadvantages of slave labour, and the same probably applied to cotton plantations too. So, from Smith's point of view, the plantations weren't profitable because they used slave labour, it was the other way about, they went on using slave labour because they were profitable enough and didn't see any need to change. One can think of parallels in the failure to invest in technology and skills in industries in Western countries in more recent times, 'we're turning a good profit, why bother?'

And it's true that cotton survived as the South's principal export in the postbellum period. Proof of Eul's point. The antebellum perception, however, doubted that it would. They couldn't think outside the box.
 
Slavery (except here at the forum:D) would have collapsed with mechanization. Slaves, like mules, are not cheap to own and maintain. Another wrong but widely held belief is all Southerners owned slave when it was truly a very small percent. Most slaves were treated far better than depicted because as stated they were cheap...

Yes, mechanization would have likely ended plantation slavery, though Baptist makes the point that slavery was taking hold in factories in Richmond, Virginia, the most industrialized part of the South in the 1850s. We certainly see a form of semi-slavery in factories in places like Bangladesh today (China, also, though conditions have improved there recently).

He also makes the point that the North profited greatly from slavery, particularly New York, whose banks loaned money to the Southern plantation owners and brokered the cotton sales to Europe and New England.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a story about this on another site http://www.a1ebooks.com/book.htm?pr=11940 Shameless plug, I know....
 
Actually I've only just noticed, just before you topped 50,000 Wragg,
I snuck past 80.000 - not sure who gave me the crucial nudge,
but thanks everyone! :bdsm-heart:
So you did! :)

Well done!:)
 
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