#1619 one more time... Let's say: 1. Slavery is anathema to the system of free contract and exchange which is the system that does the most to build wealth. 2. Slavery characterized 300 years of real-world colonial and independent American economic life. 1/n
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There's no conflict there. You just have to say either 3a. The real-world economic history of the United States is not a near approximation of the system of free contract and exchange which is the system that does the most to build wealth. 2/n
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Then you can acknowledge how morally compromised the real American political-economy was by slavery without having it impugn your ideal economic system. (I'm here deliberately avoiding the dispute over whether the word "capitalism" names the ideal, the reality, or both.) 3/n
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Agree that descriptive versus prescriptive issues get conflated in slavery/capitalism debate. That happens in large part due to philopietistic history (Founding Fathers could do no wrong). Useful to disentangle.
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