On Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 7:48:30 PM UTC-5, Frank Krygowski wrote:
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:-) A federal income tax was originally enacted on October 1913.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.
--
- Frank Krygowski

John B. wrote that the daily wage of unskilled labor was $1 per day. Lets say $250 per year. And I have read many, many times that in olden times that laborers earned just barely enough to survive. Everything they earned was used for housing, food, etc. Nothing was leftover for savings. So I think we could estimate the slave owner costs for keeping one slave for a year at about $250. The same wages paid to an unskilled laborer. Back in the 1700-1800s time period I doubt the cost of living was that different across the states.

So a slave owner pays $250 to house and feed his slave each year. A unskilled wage earner is paid $250 each year. And he uses every penny of this to live on. But the slave owner has to pay $500, two years wages, up front to get the slave before he pays the $250 annual cost to keep the slave. Seems the slave owner starts $500 in the hole. And of course the slave owner also has to pay for management, guards to make the slaves work.

In most situations, slavery was not the economic godsend some people seem to imagine. And remember slavery also existed simply because there was not enough labor, people to do the work. That is the better reason for slavery to exist in the USA. But if there are enough laborers (northern factory towns), then slavery loses its economic advantage.