Happy Juneteenth!

Gave my slaves the day off.

Don't be a hater, Violet.

The Big Lie that the US was founded on slavery and that it was the source of our nation's great wealth. Closely followed by the Republicans were the racists and the dems were responsible for the freeing of the slaves.

https://www.rodmartin.org/p/juneteenth-no-americas-wealth-wasnt?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2471308&post_id=166244786&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=faen9&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

One hundred sixty years ago today, slaves in Texas received word for the first time that they’d been emancipated. They called that day Juneteenth. It is certainly worthy of celebration.

But the same Democrat Party that enslaved black Americans, who fought a war to keep them slaves, and failing that spent the next century terrorising and degrading them and their grandchildren, doesn’t celebrate this holiday so much as it uses it as a club, to stoke division among people who had nothing to do with any of that.

One means by which they do this is the lie that “the wealth of America was built on the backs of slaves.” The irony is, the Democrat South lost precisely because it was not, and that same Democrat South remained an impoverished backwater for the next century because Democrats never learned the lesson.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

This was precisely the issue on which the Republican Party was founded — and I’m pleased to note that not only did my party free the slaves and give them the vote, it also never had a member who owned a slave, and never had its own terror wing like the KKK, the Weather Underground, BLM or Antifa.

The party that within one election of its founding elected Lincoln was launched on a platform of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men”. The details of the then-current political debate in 1856 and 1860 are worthy of discussion, but the idea is simple:

• Slavery is inherently wrong
• Free men create and innovate, while slaves (and their masters) do not
• Over time the masters become a de facto feudal aristocracy and thereby a threat to the Republic and the Constitution.

Lincoln believed that slavery would eventually destroy the Republic. If you understand Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” you know why. You also know why leftists from Howard Zinn to David Hogg loathe Turner. But they hate Hayek for the same reason.

By the time Lincoln won the Presidency, the free North had pulled mightily ahead of the slave South by virtually every measure, but certainly in terms of factories, railroads, shipping, and everything needed to create a modern economy…or fight a continental war.

The result? By failing to avert war (by stupidly attacking Fort Sumter at a moment at which there was almost zero political support for Lincoln attacking the South), and then failing to knock out the North early (say, in the follow-up to a needed victory at Antietam), the South found itself in a war of attrition it could never win, simply by the weight of Northern economic might. And that might had come into being — almost ex nihilo — by the tireless labors and brilliant entrepreneurship of free men.

And then the North destroyed what little the South had.

Marxist historians claim that slave-based crops like cotton, and the finished goods that came from them, created American wealth. But economic historians Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode note that “US cotton played no role in kick-starting the Industrial Revolution.” Worse still, although cotton exports comprised a large share of total exports prior to the Civil War, they accounted for only around 5 percent of the nation’s GDP.

So unless Standard Oil, and Edison Electric, and the Union Pacific, and Carnegie Steel were all built by slaves no one knew about, the wealth of America was built by free men. And a great many former slaves participated in the creation.

The case for envy is laughable. Slavery held the South back. It built manors little different from those of medieval lords and with roughly that rate of advancement. Meanwhile, the real action was to the north and west, where creative free peoples transformed the Earth.

I was an oldest child.

Still am.

You shouldn't let me know it bugs you.

Violet.

Marxists/NY Times lie and somehow that's my problem. I don't like to be lied to. On the other hand, leftards lie and love to be lied to.

Gasbag trivializes a genuine celebration of U.S. slavery ending because it's just the blacks, kinda like Kwanzaa, of course.

What racism?