 Do you think that American capitalism, you know, to the extent that we're telling the story of capitalism, could it have existed without slavery? I mean, could it have been born without it? I mean, again, it's sort of like this dynamic with my daughter. She very well may go on to sort of... The story of his daughter is that he bought his daughter clothes, and now she's selling the clothes that he bought her. So he's using that as a metaphor for slavery being the basis. And now he's saying the daughter's going to build an empire off of the clothes that he bought her. And she might get some money and buy more clothes. But the seed capital, the seed for entire business was the clothes that he gave her. That's a metaphor for... Slavery is at the beginning. The capital is the known anything. It was the slaves. And they just exploited the capital they produced there in order to create the system of capitalism. So that's what the story is. He started out the video with the story about the daughter. So just filling you in. Sell the jeans that I got her for enough money that she can then buy two other pieces of clothing and build her clothing empire. But if it wasn't for me buying those jeans in the first place, she would not be able to get this thing started. Could capitalism have worked without that level of exploitation of basically free stuff to begin with? I mean, it's sort of like, you know, I don't know, could Donald Trump have a dollar to his name right now if he didn't get that money from his dad? Or however you want to... The mouse suggests no, since I think if he just put in the next fund, he would have had more. But I think the answer to the last question is definitely no. I think the earlier questions are a bit more complicated. I mean, in the abstract. I mean, I gave him credit for saying that the question is a little bit more complicated. So he's not some ideologue who's out to get capitalism in the sense of to get the system and to link it to slavery. He's going to link it a little bit, but he's not quite... I think that Sam said a usual guest that's just going to plow ahead with this lead opening that Sam has given him. So he's going to try to be a little nuanced here. Sure. I think we're talking about capitalism. We have to talk about capitalism in the plural. So certainly we know that there can be capitalisms without slave labor. We've had one since the Civil War in this country. But that said, I mean, go ahead. Everything that we had, we got to the point where that slavery, and I don't know, and I guess this is a subsidiary question that I wanted to ask. Could we have seen the industrial, the growth of industrial capitalism that really is the next era that you're talking about without that slavery, even in the north? I mean, wasn't it the ability of generating this labor-intensive commodity, ultimately cotton, that you could not have made as profitable and as commodified, I guess, were it not for the fact that we just don't have to pay for the part to really make it on some level? Yeah, I mean, these are old, important debates in economic history. Some have argued that profits from slavery directly led to investments in early industrialization. You know, those arguments, those kind of direct connections, right, haven't held up as well. Haven't held up as well. See, he's pushing back against Sam. They haven't held up as well. Oh my God, Sam, what are we going to do? Now, that's an understatement. They haven't held up, period. There is no direct connection. Cotton trade was a small fragment of the American economy. Now, one of these economists of this new school of economics did some math where he took the total worth of cotton produced in a year and then he took every intermediary step in the creation of that cotton and he added it all up, you know, the transportation and the manufacturing and the shipping and every step along the way from the picking all the way to the final good. And he added it all up and he said, well, this was 50% of GDP in the United States. But of course, that's not how you measure GDP. He's comparing apples to oranges. The only part that's captured in GDP is the value of the final product. So cotton was about 5%, not insignificant. A significant portion of the US economy was cotton. When the country was founded in 1776, cotton was insignificant. Very little exports of cotton. It's only with the invention of the cotton gin. It's only in the 1790s that cotton starts to become a real important product. It's only in the early 19th century that we started exporting huge amounts of cotton to the United Kingdom. And a lot of that, most of that has to do not with slavery, but with what? It has to do with technology. It has to do with the fact that we were developing better types of cotton that the cotton gin had been invented. That there was actually innovation and ingenuity happening that made cotton valuable. And indeed, it's true that slaves produced cotton, but that doesn't mean that slaves were essential for the production of cotton. Or indeed, the best productive way to produce the cotton. It's fascinating that in 1870, so there was a decline after Civil War, there was a decline in cotton production because of the disruption of the Civil War and everybody had gone to war, people had died. It took a while to get things ramped up, but by 1870 freed men, both blacks and whites, produced as much cotton in the south as the souths had produced from slave labor in 1860. So it's not slavery that made cotton production. And indeed, you could argue that more cotton would have been produced if they hadn't used slave labor. Slave labor is known to be not very productive, quite expensive, and not profitable from an economic perspective, profitable for the slave owner, but an economy of the south based on slavery was actually an unproductive, inefficient economy. The U.S., the south would have been far richer, far richer if it had never had slave labor. Not poorer, I mean he's making an argument that they would have been poorer, right, that they benefited from slavery, that slavery was some kind of zero cost or profit venture, that they exploited and they did exploit, they exploited labor and they did. But all the value of that exploitation went to a few rich slave owners, but economically, from an economic perspective, it was a drag on economic growth, not an accelerated economic growth. And even when it comes to cotton, as I said, by 1870, freed men were producing just as much cotton as slaves were in 1860. In India, in Southwest China, in Egypt, cotton was produced by non-slaves, cotton was not in order to be profitable, did not necessitate slavery. You know, economists, these economists claim that, oh, but slaves are cheap labor, they're much cheaper. But it turns out that a Nobel Prize economist, Robert Fogel, in 1974 wrote this paper that showed that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. So you paid for that up front. It's how any capital market works. You pay for the expected productivity of what you're buying. If you bought a slave, you face the cost of alternative uses of capital. You could have used that capital to do something else, employ people, invest in technology, invest in, I don't know, other things other than cotton potentially. There was no supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch and wealth did not just pile up on the contrary. So the share of slaves in U.S. wealth has been grossly exaggerated. It's far less than what it had been claimed before. And the fact is that most of the increase in the production of cotton was not a consequence of more slaves, but was a consequence of increased productivity. Increased productivity resulted from technology. So slavery was appalling. The victims of the slavery are the slaves. The, quote, benefactors of slavery are the slave owners. But the economy? The economy didn't get better because of slavery. It got worse because of slavery. Prosperity didn't depend on slavery. The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest of the world would have been just as rich, actually probably richer, without 250 years of slavery. And they remain rich in spite of the fact that slavery is gone from the world. All right, so let's see how Jonathan Levy deals with some of this. But I still think a weaker version of the same argument which you're suggesting has to be true in the sense that without slavery, the commercial history of the United States would have been greatly diminished, greatly diminished. Really? How would it be greatly diminished? Again, slaves are less productive than free labor, as history suggests, as economic theory suggests, as if you understand anything about human psychology and human motivation suggests. With that have meant that capitalism never would have come about. I don't know if I go, you know, that far it's an interesting counterfactual question, but we can definitely look at what did happen and say that slavery was very important to early American economic development. I think that changes over time. I think it's much more important earlier in this period. I think by the time you're in the 1840s and 1850s, you're seeing an industrial capitalism develop in the north. It starts to look different. And then I'll just say one more. It's very different. And indeed that industrial capitalism in the north is where the real world was being produced. It's where immigrants were coming in. Immigrants didn't go to the south. They went north. It's where jobs were being created. It's where real sustainable wealth was being produced. It's why during the Civil War, the north was so much richer than the south. It was because of this manufacturing capitalism. It was because of non slave dependent capitalism, free capitalism, that the north flourished as much as it did, whereas the south stagnated. So it's just not true that the commercial history of the United States depends on stave in any way, shape or form. One more thing. Slavery is the most awful for coerced labor, but coerced labor. Even when capitalism doesn't depend on slavery as such, it still oftentimes depends upon or draws from coercion of labor. And that's something we have to be mindful of. But coerced labor is never capitalism. Capitalism is the exact opposite. Capitalism is voluntary labor. It's not coerced labor. And they're trying to make, and they do, the left does this all the time, trying to make this implication that voluntary labor is equivalent to coerced labor. And that's just absolute travesty and absolute evil to make that comparison. All right. Let's keep going. Cross periods. Before we get into this next period, let me just ask you one more question, too. How Louisiana purchased, and in particular the Haitian Revolution, plays into this? I mean, as a factor in changing the course of capitalism as we head towards this next era? No. I mean, so there's a very specific point, which is that without the Revolution and Haiti, very likely Napoleon doesn't decide to sell Louisiana to the United States. And so that's a very significant. Second, I argue in the book that despite the American Revolution, it's very important, but it's not much of a discontinuity in the book. It's in the middle of the same age as I have it. And then actually what the Louisiana purchase does for the United States is it means that the United States kind of looks like the 18th century British Empire. Instead of having slave colonies in the Caribbean, with an industrial metropole in the north, and then provisioning from northeast colonial America at the time. Instead, we have this very thriving plantation complex rooted in cotton that emerges out of Louisiana that's connected commercially to the rise of Chicago cities like that in the Midwest that focused on grain, that focus on food, that focus on provisions, and that industrialization in the northeast. I mean, this idea that Chicago rose because of slavery, that Chicago that the whole provision of food and grain is all about slavery. You know, weren't there people in the north? Weren't there people in the west? Weren't there people in the south who were not slaves? Did they not need food? If there was no slavery, would there be no grain industry? Would there be no food production? Would there be no agriculture? Will there be none of this? I mean, it is such a bogus argument that these people make. They take history and they can't think beyond the direct relationships that they see, right? Slaves, food, food goes to slave. Oh, you see, they made money off of the food that went to the slaves. So there's another industry making money off of slavery. But if the slaves were free men, they'd still be eating. The industry that produces food is not dependent on slavery. It's dependent on people, but not on slavery, cross-slavery. The only people who got rich off of slaves are the slave owners and the slave traders. The people who brought them over from Africa and traded them. They look for anything. Anything to undermine capitalism. Anything to undercut it. Anything to portray it in the worst, most ugly, darkest light. Their motivation is not history. Their motivation is not to understand economics. Now, again, Levy, I think, is a little bit more honest than most of them. But the motivation of most of these 16, 19 authors is they start with the premise. Capitalism is evil. Capitalism is, was founded, was established on the backs of slaves. Now, let's go and figure out how we can manipulate the numbers and manipulate the history and find links and connections and do everything we can to abandon economic theory, to abandon economics generally, just in order to show that this is all true, that this must have happened. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. 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