Monday, July 13, 2015

High Plateau Drifter: "This and That"

Speaking of the prediction that "a breakout populist candidate will emerge in the Republican primary," High Plateau Drifter writes,

The Trump surge in the polls is very important because it marks an early indication of conflict between and among oligarchs. Most politicians are dependent crumb - catching nobody's. Their goal is to amass a comfortable living of 10 to 20 million. The best way to do that is to please their oligarch sponsors. In general, oligarchs view themselves as world citizens and feel no obligation or sense of responsibility whatever toward the American people. Trump is an oligarch and he troubles himself to run because he fears danger in the current economic malaise.

It is only when the oligarchs begin to quarrel among themselves that we might get a change that heads off disaster.

As an eighth grader at a highly selective magnet school - in truth a petri dish specimen of a poor, upwardly mobile youth for study by the children of wealthy elites who controlled the city - I immediately recognized that the graduated income tax was designed to keep me in my economic place, to make sure that my climb up the ladder would be slowed. But it took me a very long time to realize that the welfare state socialism which all of those other children so fervently supported - taxes on income to support transfer payments - was designed to push the burden of poor relief down the economic ladder to the far more numerous classes of wage earners and off the backs of those made wealthy by the industrial revolution and what followed, those who certainly did not want to assume the communitarian support obligations typically borne by the old landed aristocracy. A brilliant scheme to lift the burden from those making capital gains and shift it to salarymen and wage earners.

I also realized that chattel property rights in human beings were wildly uneconomic because of the support obligation inherent in maintaining the economic value of that chattel propert - roughly equivalent to wages for "free" labor - and the contrasting reduced risk and economic flexibility inherent in the ability to simply lay off "free" labor when an enterprise ceased to be profitable, particularly when the obligation of support was not placed on the owners of the enterprise that laid them off, but rather upon those who continued working and earning a salary or wage. The wonder of it is that such a clear economic benefit of freedom from the obligation of support for those who would otherwise bear the economic risk of layoffs and unemployment was never publicly discussed nor mentioned in those economics texts I studied at Johns Hopkins. An even greater wonder was the ease with which the shedding of economic risk of supporting or disposing of chattel property in human beings was so successfully pawned off as a great moral crusade.

And it took longer still to understand why no conservative politician ever phrases these issues in those simple and straight forward terms.

7 comments:

James said...

I also realized that chattel property rights in human beings were wildly uneconomic because of the support obligation inherent in maintaining the economic value of that chattel propert - roughly equivalent to wages for "free" labor - and the contrasting reduced risk and economic flexibility inherent in the ability to simply lay off "free" labor when an enterprise ceased to be profitable, particularly when the obligation of support was not placed on the owners of the enterprise that laid them off, but rather upon those who continued working and earning a salary or wage.

Slavery was obviously economic for the slave owners because they kept buying slaves generation after generation. If it had been wildly uneconomic for them, it would have quickly died out on its own without generating a war of secession.

Anonymous said...

Maybe not "uneconomic," in the strict sense of being absolutely unprofitable, but I take the (counterintuitive) point to be that it was less brutally extractive than pure wage labor, which disposed of all correlative obligations. An insight powerfully advanced by the likes of George Fitzhugh--noxious chap that he was--and confirmed by the relative economic underdevelopment of the South, observed by many contemporaries, as well as later work in economic history comparing the relative status of slaves as chattel property versus under the system of sharecropping/ wage labor.

Anonymous said...

oligarchs view themselves as world citizens and feel no obligation or sense of responsibility whatever toward the American people. Trump is an oligarch and he troubles himself to run because he fears danger in the current economic malaise.

No, he runs because he thinks he has found a way to amass even more power.

ADL said...

Some interesting points, as always, and absurdly reductive, as always.

High Plateau Drifter said...

As to Trump, all must recognize that his vehement criticism of trade deals that export U.S. jobs and lower U.S. wage rates is a selective attack on the interests of industries like autos, cell phones, pharmaceuticals and other manufacturing interests. You will note that he does not criticize the financial industry which fills most of his real estate projects in NYC. In that respect he could be a stalking horse candidate who wants to shift popular anger away from the "banksters" and onto the manufacturers. Curiously, he says nothing about bloated government, or unrepayable debt totals, or Fed money printing to finance deficits.

He is divisive but it is a divisiveness directed at other powerful entrenched interests, who we expect might retaliate in kind. This could be a fun political season to watch.

High Plateau Drifter said...

While the top of my family tree sits unsurprisingly a wealthy sea captain who lodged himself in Nova Scotia, a favorite hangout for those we euphemistically call "privateers", and who managed to marry a debutante from Rhode Island. Yet most of the subsequent generations marrying into that tree were victims of the "enclosures" and "clearances" driven off the commons, arrested for vagrancy and then "transported" to the Canadian Maritimes as chattel property for a term, but often for life, by a local magistrate or court in England or Scotland. Mortality on the passage over the Atlantic was 25 to 30% as was typical for blacks purchased as captives from Africa.

Sorry to destroy the moralistic narrative but the majority of white people arriving in North America prior to approximately 1830 were chattel property, far more numerous than Blacks. The only difference was that the whites had a sort of "certificate of origin" from the mother country, something that warring chiefs of African tribes were not equipped to supply when selling their captives.

As an undergraduate, I can recall several sociology texts which recited the research of Cliometricians (economic historians) which found that food and clothing consumption of plantation slaves in the South was identical to amounts and values of food and clothing consumed by northern free white farmers - research confirmed in some detail in the book "Time on the Cross." (Hopkins, back in the day, was a shockingly non-ideological place).

The modern narrative fails to consider the obvious, namely that the white soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War and who came overwhelmingly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin hated slavery because their grandparents or great grandparents were former or runaway slaves from the New England states.

It is hard for moderns living in a society where every facet of life is regulated by an homogenizing state, to imagine the diverse circumstances of slaves of both races in local societies to which the writ of government could not effectively run. By and large the owners of human chattel property were reasonable and just, as their status among their property owning neighbors was determined by the orderly, humane and prosperous administration of their land holdings. But then not all property owners were created equal, and there certainly were abuses at the margin, of which a stiflingly uniform propaganda narrative may be stitched from the loose cuttings.


ADL said...

@ High Plains Drifter: I think you're performing a rather large elision when you conflate white farmers'/servants' and black slaves' conditions of life prior to the Civil War and label both "slavery." You offer some interesting if perhaps undersupported points but I think take them a bit far.

When you talk about chattel, I assume you are referring to the various forms of indenture. Do you see no qualitative difference between a system of limited-duration indenture (even for a lifetime, though how frequent was this?) and one of unlimited-duration? In one case, white humans were severely bound by harsh contracts. In another, they were property. To overstate, that is the difference between being a rookie baseball player and being a couch.

The states you mention did indeed provide more Union soldiers than did New England, New Jersey and New York, though not by an "overwhelming" margin--in fact, they provided soldiers in rough proportion to aggregate population. Also, what is your basis for the assertion that these soldiers were descended from escaped "slaves"? And if they were indeed populated by runaways, it begs another question: where are the black runaway slaves' armies? Were there none (or far fewer) because blacks didn't care about freeing slaves? Or because the conditions of servitude were actually qualitatively different for blacks and whites, and far fewer blacks escaped and were able to build lives for themselves as poor farmers?

I once saw Newt Gingrich perform something similar regarding a policy of Clinton's: He began by saying, "You have to remember, over thirty percent of Americans disagree with this." Five sentences later: "And, as I said, thirty or maybe even forty percent of Americans don't like this." Two sentences later: "Just remember, this is a close issue. Nearly half of Americans disagree with the president, after all." He concluded: "The president needs to listen to the other side, since, as I've said, more than half of American take the other side of this." I think it quite possible he thought his statements were consistent with one another.