On 4/23/2019 7:52 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Tue, 23 Apr 2019 11:00:21 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 10:48:08 AM UTC-5, Frank Krygowski wrote:

Our economic system generates more profits to those who reduce expenses,
and employees are seen as expenses.
--
- Frank Krygowski

Yes, one of the economic problems with slavery. There are many moral problems
with slavery of course. But in current and even past times when
employees can be paid a subsistence wage or minimum wage, it is much
cheaper to hire people at poverty wages than it is to have slaves.
Slaves, because they are personal property, require food, housing,
medical care. All of which adds up to much more than subsistence
wages paid to desperate employees. Employee wages are of course a tax
deductible expense. Not sure how slave owners dealt with slave upkeep
expenses. Actually not sure when the US started the federal income
taxes. Maybe it was after slavery officially ended.

:-) A federal income tax was originally enacted on October 1913.

According to:
Slave Prices in the Lower South, 1722-1815
Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
University of Kansas

In 1815 the median price of a male slave was $500 (which is !$7,958.44
in 2017). Salaries for a skilled craftsman, in Massachusetts, in 1815,
was in the range of $2.00 a day, for unskilled workers it was in the
$1.00 a day range.

So yes, as the North had learned, hiring help was cheaper...

? If you paid $500 for a slave you had him for the rest of his life.
You'd spend that much on an unskilled worker in a year and a half, and
have to keep on spending. True, there would be some cost in housing and
feeding a slave, but it seemed they tended to minimize that expense.
Then there was the possibility of profiting by breeding.

... at least
for those who didn't operate a large plantation, was cheaper than
buying and maintaining slaves.

I wonder about other North-South differences. My vague impression is
that the north was using its labor more to populate factories - to
produce iron, fabrics, mechanical devices, etc. while the south was
using its labor to harvest and bale cotton and other agricultural goods.

In the one case, the workers could be brought to the specific place
where the work was done - indeed, could be brought there from overseas
if necessary. And if one worker or group of workers were unproductive or
made trouble, there were plenty more waiting to take their place.

Seems it was different on a southern plantation. You had to run your
plantation with the workers you had - or owned.

Not that I'm an expert on this, by any means. But I know that contrary
to popular belief, slavery was almost universal through most of human
history. It certainly wasn't just the evil American southerners vs. the
helpless folks they captured in Africa.

And I recall reading that one main reason the North was able to get rid
of slavery was because machines had been invented to do the work. The
Roman empire (for just one example) could not have sustained itself
without slaves.

--
- Frank Krygowski