Giardiasis said:
Well definitely the former, but the question of time is not the issue, it is your ability.
Ability? If you mean a knowledge of history and political economy I've got you well covered. Here's 15 minutes of my time to prove it.
Well, let's play then. You free marketeers think that slavery was a consequence of government regulation. Wrong. Slavery is an ancient institution that was both cultural and economic. It existed thousands of years before governments as we know them existed - between African tribes, or for example, the Ancient Greeks took slaves from other city states that they conquered. Hell, the neanderthals were probably doing it to cro-magnon man before there was "government" and probably "economy" as we think of them. Slavery has both a political and economic dimension. To call it purely an economic phenomenon is wrong - but to call it a consequence of regulation is "not even wrong" as Richard Feyneman might have said. In other words, you are not even in the right ballpark.
Giardiasis, you waffle on about slaves being part of society. Well, yes and no. Some people considered slaves subhuman, or even not human. Even if you recognised slaves as human beings, without recourse to ideas of the rights of men (what we might now call "human rights") then there was no problem considering a human being the property of another human being. And no, it wasn't the work of Adam Smith (great though his work was) or a recognition that slavery was a distortion of a "free market" that led to the emancipation of the slaves - it was the work of mostly Christian abolitionists (in the Western world anyway) who argued on primarily Christian ethical grounds that it was immoral for one man to own and exploit another, as we are all equal in the eyes of God.
Now Adam Smith was right to argue that in a free and developed society with strong political and judicial institutions, with education, and with the recognition of the rights of free men, a slave economy is not going to cut it. But that doesn't remove the fact that a large part of the wealth of Britain and of the colonies in the Americas was built on the backs of slaves who were exploited ruthlessly by capitalists operating in a climate of non-regulation. To claim they were "part of society" also neglects the fact that most slaves were working in the colonies, growing tobacco, cotton, and mining for gold and diamonds. Most of this wealth then found its way back to the Mother Country. Slaves were not part of society - they were nameless and unknown sources of labor and wealth thousands of miles away from "society". Hence they could be exploited, tortured, and killed or worked to death with no problem for either the morality or economy of "society".
The free marketeers claim that a market unfettered by government regulation will lead to happy prosperity for all, with no exploitation by one group over another. Did you completely forget about the history of the industrial revolution or even the 20th century? Unregulated markets have led to gross exploitation of humans, the environment, (not to mention mum and dad investors). The examples of this are just too numerous to list - rampant pollution (before governments intervened to prevent it), exploitation of workers through low rates of pay and dangerous workplaces - why pay more to workers or give them a safe working environment if we can just hire new workers. Why care about how much the factory pollutes - it damages the environment but not my bottom line.
All these things are covered in economic theory under the concept of "social cost" which essentially explains how as rational economic actors companies will try to maximise profits by minimising expenditure on safety or pollution control etc by shifting these costs back onto society or the environment. The debate then becomes - do we prevent this "rational activity" (from the perspective of a free market) through government regulation, or purely through social and market pressures? One works, the other doesn't. Some say that, all things being equal, in a perfect world, the free market will correct all problems in the long run - but as JM Keynes once said, "in the long run we are all dead".
Now free marketeers say that intervention distorts their precious free markets - and it does. But the issue is do you want a perfect free market with no regulation and end up with industrial England with black skies, soot over everything in sight, polluted rivers streams and air, and workers being paid a pittance for the priviledge of being killed in industrial accidents or dying of cancer and other industrial diseases, or do you want a regulated economy where these things are minimised.
Massive Tiger is right too - the Civil War in the US was about many things, not just slavery - the slavery issue was a trigger, and was resolved through the defeat of the South.
