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January 30, 2004
The Economics of Manumission
In reading Volokh it occured to me that the best way to defeat any capitalist enterprise is by ignoring it. This is in synergy with the chink in Wal-Mart's armor. The English idiom 'paying attention' is perfectly suited for the essence of profitability. If you look, you pay.
Buying slaves to free them doesn't work. To disable a slave economy, slaves must be freed, not bought.
My own family has its curse associated with American slavery. On my mother's side we are light, bright and damned near white, passing paper bag and ruler tests since antiquity. Louisiana records show us as 'Free People of Color' and it is for that reason, never having been slaves, I was able to track my family tree back 7 generations. Although I cannot know for sure, the curse didn't appear out of nowhere, so I believe it to be true - it being the fact that somewhere some ancestor of mine owned slaves, although it's clear we didn't retain any real estate. This leads me to believe we were engaged in the common practice of liberation through purchase. Having no soil to till, Louisiana petty bourgeois of color purchased relatives and strangers from the fields and put them to work in houses and kitchens. The law in Louisiana was once a slave, always a slave. They couldn't buy their own freedom. If it weren't for the invalidation of sales, slave traders could have devised contracts to make ending slavery as profitable as slavery itself.
Posted by mbowen at January 30, 2004 08:21 AM
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