Reading a column by Karen Attiah in the Washington Post (“Monuments of White Supremacy Obscure the History of Colonial Crimes. That’s Why They Must Come Down,” June 13, 2020), I remembered the guy who defended the state by asking, “If the state did not exist, who would have abolished slavery?” The real question is, of course, “If the state did not exist, who would have protected slave owners with overwhelming monopolistic force?” The guy should have known Article IV, Section 2 of the US Constitution about fugitive slaves, which remained in force until the 13th Amendment in 1865:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
Most of Ms. Attiah’s column can be read as a justified attack on the governments who financed and enforced racial discrimination, not only by erecting statues but in more direct ways. She mentions Belgian king Léopold II, a “brutal colonial ruler” whose
claim to genocidal fame was his orchestration of mass violence against the people in the Congo, a large portion of which he considered his personal territory for cultivating and exporting rubber and ivory.
She also writes:
Powerful governments erased the contributions of black people, the customs and traditions of native populations during colonization—and then whitewashed the evidence of the great harm done to these communities.
She ignores many things, though, such as zoning laws, which were originally adopted to prevent black Americans from using their economic freedom to move into white neighborhoods and which continue incognito to play that function today. (See my Regulation review of Jonathan Rothwell’s recent book, A Republic of Equals: “The One-Percenter State,” Regulation, Spring 2020; and my Econlog post “Rothwell Si, Piketty No!” But, to be fair to Ms. Attiah, one can’t talk about everything in one column.
The problem has not been private discrimination but government-enforced discrimination.
I suspect Ms. Attiah is not a closet anarcho-capitalist, because such people are rather rare at the Washington Post. But if what she wants to defend is individual liberty instead of group identity, she might want to reflect on the following classical-liberal principle and apply it also to other issues than race: Grant to the state only powers that would not be dangerous if the worst racist (or hater of any minority) came to its helm. Who knows, you might not always be in a group preferred by the government.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 16 2020 at 9:45am
Slavery has existed in some pretty minimalist states, pre-
Christian Anglo Saxon Britain for example.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 18 2020 at 10:37am
@Thomas: Certainly not “minimal” in the sense that they did not have “powers that would not be dangerous if the worst racist (or hater of any minority) came to its helm.”
Roger D McKinney
Jun 19 2020 at 9:23pm
Slavery was universal before Christian culture in Europe abolished it. Even the tribes in the US practiced it.
nobody.really
Jun 16 2020 at 11:48am
This has always struck me as a conceptual challenge for libertarianism: Does it offend you when the state employs its overwhelming monopolistic force to defend all property rights–or merely the property rights you disapprove of?
I don’t know what Art IV, Sec. 2’s language on fugitive slaves accomplished that Art. IV, Sec. 1’s “full faith and credit” language didn’t already accomplish. After all, your state could adopt a policy saying that it won’t recognize the claims of out-of-state car owners, and anyone who drives a stolen car into the state will be deemed to thereby acquire ownership of it. But that darn “full faith and credit” language, backed by the “monopolistic force” of the state, will require your state to recognize the claims of out-of-state car owners anyway. Is that really such a bad outcome?
In short, I don’t think the problem here is with the state’s exercise of monopolistic force to enforce property rights; I think the problem arises from regarding humans as property.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 18 2020 at 10:48am
@nobody.really: Whenever the state succeeds in crushing a minority, especially a large one, it must obviously rely on overwhelming force. Classical-liberals and libertarians want to limit this overwhelming force to specific areas of intervention defined by the protection of individual liberty; anarcho-capitalists think that this is impossible to do and that the state and its overwhelming force must be abolished.
Roger D McKinney
Jun 19 2020 at 9:16pm
Libertarians have always held that humans cannot be property. So yes, we have very specific ideas about what can be considered property and people aren’t one of those.
Roger D McKinney
Jun 19 2020 at 9:19pm
“your state could adopt a policy saying that it won’t recognize the claims of out-of-state car owners”
A libertarian state would never do that. You have a libertarian government confused with the modern Leviathan state that has no limits.
Roger D McKinney
Jun 19 2020 at 9:20pm
My comment above to Pierre above was meant for noboday-really.
JK Brown
Jun 16 2020 at 3:19pm
The first thing to recognize is that slavery is not “illegal” in the U.S., it is unconstitutional. And the constitution imposes restrictions on government. This distinction is because slavery is a societal condition. It is the placement of a segment of the population outside the protection of some of the laws. Without government (society) support of slavery, then anyone “enslaved” could pursue those who enslaved them in the courts and via the government’s enforcement of laws against forced labor, unlawful imprisonment, etc. Nor would the enslaver be able to call upon the local authorities to seize and return the individual. Quite the contrary, the police powers of government would be directed against the “master” once the “enslaved” filed a complaint.
Also, Article IV, Section 2 of the US Constitution was not just about fugitive slaves, but also fugitive indentured servants and apprentices. Ben Franklin being a famous example of the latter. George Washington is documented to have placed ads for the return of, at least, two indentured servants. This fills out the history, but doesn’t alter much of the perception since economics had flipped the indentured servants/African slave cost model starting in the 1680s. Also, in the 1790s, with the introduction of the steam engine and cotton gin, cotton cultivation took off increasing the value, and demand, of African slaves who survived the climate in cotton growing areas better than imported Europeans as cotton agriculture expanded across the Deep South in the early 1800s.
Initially, in Maryland anyway, African slaves were classed as indentured servants along side Whites. There was even consideration of tying them to the land like serfs rather than as chattel after slavery of non-christian Africans was justified. But economics won over morality, when African slaves started converting to Christianity, the law was amended to the racial mess we still live with.
I recently came across an interesting look at the economics of indentured servitude in the Americas.
The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis Author(s): David W. Galenson
Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar., 1984), pp. 1-26 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2120553 .
Mark Brady
Jun 16 2020 at 7:31pm
“She [Karen Attiah] ignores many things, though, such as zoning laws, which were originally adopted to prevent black Americans from using their economic freedom to move into white neighborhoods and which continue incognito to play that function today.”
Ignores? Why in an article entitled “Monuments of White Supremacy Obscure the History of Colonial Crimes. That’s Why They Must Come Down” would a reader expect the author to write about the impact of zoning laws, significant as they may be to explain segregation in the twentieth-century United States? Indeed, it would be odd if the author did mention those laws in an article with that title.
Caveat. I write this without access to the article.
Idriss Z
Jun 18 2020 at 2:59pm
Excellent point Mark. Additionally, how can you come to the conclusion that “The problem has NOT been private discrimination but government-enforced discrimination (emphasis mine)”? Government did not mandate stores and restaurants to put up signs such as “No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs,” that certainly is an example of private discrimination that is a big part of the problem, there are an enormous amount of other examples. Rather private discrimination and gov’t discrimination work in a mutually symbiotic relationship between each other that is parasitic to society as a whole: without business support and approval then legislators, regulators, and law enforcement would not be able yield their positions in such discriminatory manners and without governmental approval businesses would not be able to discriminate openly (redlining for example) and behind closed doors (lack of diversity hiring and empowerment).
I hope no one reads the good points you make and think the quoted conclusion follows naturally, rationally, or substantively from the evidence. It does not, private discrimination most certainly is a problem that is enhanced and enhances governmental discrimination. All attempts to excuse one by blaming the other is what allows such bigotry to thrive, please be more careful with your conclusions, this is an important time to do so for all of us.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 21 2020 at 5:38pm
@Idriss Z: Consider immigrants in the 19th century. A large proportion of native Americans and Anglo-Saxon immigrants, if not most of them, did not like immigrants and discriminated against them. The immigrants were able to overcome this for a number of reasons that all relate to free markets: they were able to offer their labor at lower rates and lodging owners were willing (even eager: good greed!) to accept their dollars. The problem was mild because there was no legal discrimination for white immigrants. The problem is indeed public discrimination.
On the economics of discrimination, see my post “Discrimination and Harvard Discrimination,” Econlog, June 24, 2018. It’s not the last word on the topic, but it provides an introduction.
Justin
Jun 18 2020 at 4:17pm
“If the state did not exist, who would have protected slave owners with overwhelming monopolistic force?”
Private security companies? The force may not be monopolistic, but it could still be overwhelming.
Say you have a region with several dozen large plantations. The security force has 3-4 staff members at each plantation at any one time and perhaps with sixty to seventy armed men in reserve in case there was an uprising in any particular location. Any slave who physically resists the commands of their owners or the security staff are unceremoniously shot.
The general populace at the time has the mores of the antebellum south, and there are other competing private security companies, who may be called by other individuals if there is an uprising (a white southerner would likely have been terrified of a slave uprising even if they weren’t his slaves), or indeed private security companies may offer mutual aid to each other for a fee.
Admittedly this is a very hypothetical counterfactual, but I don’t see why this state of affairs couldn’t have been quite stable. John Browns would likely be outgunned by the well armed and well trained employees of the private security companies. Moreover, because there is no one security company which could dominate the others, there would need to be a consensus of the private security companies that enforcing such a system was wrong, despite being very profitable.
It’s not clear to me that the lack of government in the antebellum south would have made things better.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 21 2020 at 5:22pm
Justin: What the state prevented was the exit option, like fleeing to the North. There was also lot of free land to the West. This was true both in the colonies and later in the federation.
I just read in David Stasavage’s The Decline and Rise of Democracy (2020) what seems to be pretty obvious:
After the Constitution, Article IV, Section 2 reinforced the closing of the exit option.
JK Brown
Jun 22 2020 at 9:48pm
Pierre Lemieux: You might find this 1974 Master’s thesis ‘Blacks Before the Law in Colonial Maryland’ of interest. Lots of links to the actual law or court cases that gives a good feel for how African slavery evolved in Maryland (and by proxy elsewhere) out of indentured servitude. There is discussion of slaves and servants trying to escape to the West and the legal impacts on servants who aided slaves compared to servants escaping alone.
Another contexts is to consider the low country of South Carolina (Charleston) where 30,000 whites were surrounded by 100,000 African slaves. And the psychic impact of the Haitian Revolution, which was the successful slave revolt against the French from 1791-1804. Being slaughtered was a constant fear of whites even as they imported more slaves to take advantage of the rise in demand for cotton production.
TMC
Jun 18 2020 at 6:54pm
Slavery has existed much longer than ‘strong’ states. In every society.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 21 2020 at 5:24pm
TMC: By “strong states,” with the “strong” emphasized, you must refer to political rulers strong enough to enforce slavery or help slave owners enforce it. This is consistent with what I said.
Idriss Z
Jun 23 2020 at 3:51pm
Interestingly, I envisioned you putting the emphasis on “states” as opposed to “strong”. I thought slavery originated in tribes with decentralized leadership and all you had to do was take their weapons away in a sense. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
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