From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr)
Subject: Re: child labor and minimum wage.
Organization: UDel, School of Life & Health Sciences
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 06:33:02 GMT

In article <1k17smINN25d@armory.centerline.com> mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes:
}I didn't bother to present a rebuttal before simply because I felt that your
}argument was stupid on the face of it.  Not because I didn't have a counter
}argument.

Au contraire, yours are prima facie uninformed.

}Let's look at what you claim.
}
}Governments never denied slaves their rights because government NEVER forced
}anyone to be a slaveowner.
Their owners denied slaves their rights.  Owners
}could and did free their slaves if they wanted to, several ways, such as
}shipping them north or returning them to Africa (Liberia for example.)
}The US government was laissez-faire on this issue, a hard-won compromise.

Does the name "Dred Scott" ring a bell?  Ever heard of the Fugitive Slave
Act?

}Sorry, but I don't buy Spooner's "Unconstitutionality of Slavery" sight unseen:
}his "No Treason" was sufficiently specious to make me wary of any of his
}writings.

This is on a par with those of the Christian Right who condemned "The Last
Temptation of Christ" without having seen it.

We also have the historical evidence of its lack of acceptance
}as legally valid, just as for "No Treason".

By some.  Others did accept it, such as abolitionists in the Free
Constitutionalist Party.

Slavery was NEVER established to
}be unconstitutional: the point was made moot.  However, considering that some
}of the authors of the Constitution were slave owners, and that a number of the
}signing states allowed slavery, and that abolition was strongly argued against, it is absurd to consider that the original intent was for slavery to be
}unconstitutional.  And if original intent is not the measure, then what is
}constitutional is what the Supreme Court says is constitutional.

This false dichotomy between original intent and the arbitrary indicates
a very impoverished understanding of constitutional interpretation.

If Spooner
}can't even get right what's constitutional, I can't see how he can do so with
}the even vaguer common law.  Please show me (I've been to Missouri.  :-)

At least he actually was a lawyer and knew something about the law.  Further-
more, he used the methods of constitutional interpretation used by most
defenders of slavery (that what IS authorized takes priority over what was
merely intended) to refute their apologies.

}The importation of slaves was a free market phenominon...
}This was a free market in
}slaves because it was uncoerced and unregulated by government through most of
}our history.

Obtuse fool, those enslaved were coerced; their right to the fruits of their
labor was "regulated" by private as well as governmental force.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your claim that the slave trade
wasn't intervened in by any State - neither US nor African - even though
it's ahistorical.  If this were true, would that make the slave trade a
free market?  No.  Even if only private coercive intervention is all that
there is in a market, it is unfree.  If a market includes such coercion as a
general practice, as you claim slavery was, then it is unfree.

}Please name one case where the US government said "you must now own this slave"
}or "you've never been a slave before, but you are one now."  Slavery has always
}been initiated by capitalists.

You insist upon calling mercantilism capitalist, a standard equivocation in
any socialist's repertoire.  Slavery is no more capable of being a capitalist
practice than kidnapping.

Scrapping your arbitrary restriction of your question to the US government,
many of those traded as slaves in the US were enslaved by African governments.
This was common practice with prisoners of intertribal warfare until quite
recently in world history, and not just in Africa.  It's only as the
libertarian values of the West have spread that slavery has been abolished in
some of its forms.

}>In the case of Thomas Jefferson, there was: a restrictive covenant on his
}>inheritance.  He tried to get a statute banning slavery passed while he was
}>in the Virginia colony legislature, but failed.
}
}Who placed the covenant on his inheritance?  Was it a government, or was it
}the capitalist he inherited from?

Capitalist?  Not to the extent that he was a slaveowner.

}I suspect that TJ could have freed his slaves somehow; if only by selling them
}for a pittance to an abolitionist.

I don't know.

Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! - Think Universally, Act Selfishly
starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu

"True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten
oneself and others." - Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire