 So let's go over some of the arguments that they make. Let me start by the fact that they never define capitalism. They never define capitalism because they don't want to put capitalism into a box, to have a definition, to be clear, and then have to say, well, this isn't exactly capitalism and this doesn't fit. Capitalism is what they don't like. Capitalism is that which brought about the evils that they identify in American society today and in American history. It doesn't help them to define capitalism. It doesn't define it badly because then they're stuck. They're stuck with a particular view of capitalism. They never define it. Because if you define capitalism as the system of individual rights, if you define capitalism as a system where there's separation of state from economics, if you define capitalism as a system where there's so role of government as the protection of individual rights, where it's separate from the economy and where all property is privately owned, then slavery isn't consistent with capitalism. And most of what they complain about in terms of what the state does isn't consistent with capitalism. And we don't live in a capitalist country today, so they have to complain about their economy, which is not as interesting as if they could just blame every bad thing that exists out there on capitalism. Let's look at some of the specific claims that they make. So for example, there's a claim that these historians make. Some of this is ridiculous, so bear with me, but this is things they actually claim. Double entry bookkeeping was established as a means of doing business by slavery. The slave owners had a very sophisticated accounting depreciation double entry bookkeeping. The whole shebang. Now, this is bizarre, because if you know anything about history, you know the double entry bookkeeping was introduced into Europe in Italy in the Renaissance. And indeed, the double entry bookkeeping was first used by the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire. And the Italians got it from North Africa. And the double entry bookkeeping was used by the Dicis. It was used by businesses in Europe through the Renaissance and onwards. Slave owners didn't invent double entry bookkeeping. It's just bizarre. Let me just find this accounting. So yeah, American business started using double entry bookkeeping around the middle part of the 19th century, had nothing to do with slavery. And if they'd not been slave in America, they have never brought in double entry bookkeeping from Europe. I mean, it's just weird that they would even come up with something like depreciation. Depreciation accounting was used in the North, in growth industries that employed expensive and long-lived assets. Railroads used depreciation. It wasn't started by slave owners. It was much more useful and much more engaged with in the industrial North than it was in slave-owning South. So no way. Futures markets, they claim. Cotton was a commodity. Prices can go up and down. So they started to have futures markets and different forms of financial markets that would ensure cotton. This is all made up. And of course, so it's slavery and cotton industry in the United States is what led to a thriving financial markets, the Chicago Board of Trade, the future markets in Chicago, all of that is somehow a creation of the cotton market. But that's just factually, historically nonsense. I mean, literally these historians make stuff up. I mean, the first official exchange, futures exchange, was called the Royal Exchange, was established in 1570, 46 years before James Starr's settlement in 1619. A former futures market was established in Japan in the late 1600s for rice in America. The first futures market was written in 1851 in the North in Chicago and it had nothing to do with cotton. Futures contracts in Chicago were overwhelmingly contracts in wheat, corn, barley, rye, oat, not cotton. They literally make stuff up. And this is the challenge you have as a definitive capitalism. The challenge is that the other side just invents history. They lie or they're so incompetent they don't know they're inventing it. I guess that's a possibility. This has been pointed out right as I've written about this. Phil Magnus is just one of them, but there's some well known economists have written about it, right? For example, this idea of depreciation in industry in the North, Brazill, Warren and Walsh wrote a paper about this. There are plenty of papers showing that this new school, they call themselves the new history of capitalism school, is just not true, nonsense. As part of this, they make the claim, for example, that modern capital markets were a result of slavery. A result of slavery. Again, a result of cotton, right? But securitizations were used by land companies in early 1700s America, had nothing to do with slavery or cotton, right? And again, what about financial markets in Holland? What about financial markets in the UK? It's just, again, made up stuff. Financial markets first started going global in the late 1600s. And that's true of mobility. Again, I told you before about making up the idea that cotton was at the core of the entire American economy. This is a book by Baptiste, that is just completely, complete nonsense. As other authors have written, quote, Baptiste study of capitalism and slavery is flawed beyond repair. All and all Baptiste's arguments on the sources of slave productivity growth and on the essentiality of slavery for the rise of capitalism have a little historical foundation, raised bewildering and unanswered contradictions, selectively ignore contradicting evidence and are error-ridden. GDP growth in the United States actually accelerated after the war. Why did real GDP per capita grow after the war? Not GDP growth because GDP growth is influenced by immigration. GDP per capita accelerates after the Civil War. I mean, there's a period in which there's a recession. I mean, you'd expect after a war like that. But then it just takes off in the 1870s and 1880s. Why? Because of capitalism, because of freedom, because of innovation. Not because of capital from slavery. The North was already much richer than the South. Cotton was never significant source. Indeed, people have run these regressions where they compare the percent of the population that were slaves relative to per capita GDP. And they show an inverse relationship. The more slaves, the lower the GDP. The fewer slaves, the higher the GDP. And this is, by the way, hundreds of years later. That is true. Hundreds of years later, 200 years later. It's still true. It's still true today. And you can do the same thing on states. States that had no slavery are generally richer than slaves that had a lot of slaves like Mississippi and South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama. They're the poorest states. They're richer states. Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire. Slavery was an economic drag on the economy. And not only was, in some senses, that legacy continues. Continues to be a drag on the economies that had slaves. It is a long-term disaster. Cotton didn't make America rich and cotton couldn't be produced anywhere in the world. Indeed, during the Civil War, the British bought cotton from Egypt instead of from the United States. It wasn't like we were the only source. There's this false economic idea that exports drive the economy. Yes, cotton was a big portion of exports, but exports don't drive the economy. Production, productivity, technology, innovation. That's what creates wealth. That's what drives the economy. And finally, there's this point that the people who defended slavery in the South, the people who defended slavery in the South were anti-capitalists. Indeed, the people who defended slavery in the South feared capitalism because they knew that capitalism would drive slavery out. They knew that if Adam Smith's ideas won from an economic perspective, put aside a political moral perspective, but just economic perspective, from the economic perspective, that slavery would lose. It's slavery would be driven out. Indeed, Adam Smith was a huge anti-slavery advocate. So the number one capitalist thinker of the time, again, in economic sense, was anti-slavery. Capitalists, they advocates for capitalism. And Phil Magnus does a great job of bringing all this out. The advocates for capitalism were anti-slavery. The advocates against capitalism were pro-slavery. And indeed, some of the biggest pro-slavery advocates in the South considered slavery the ultimate form of socialism, not capitalism, socialism. So slavery is a form of mercantilism. It's a product of mercantilism. Mercantilism sees the state, the so-called common good, as the end. It sees the state as guiding the economy. It's anti-free trade. It's anti-free labor. It's anti-free movement of goods. Capital and people. Capitalism liberates the world from mercantilism and from feudalism. By doing so, capitalism ends slavery. It's not an accident. It is not an accident. That the country that abolishes slavery and abolishes the trade in slaves, first is the United Kingdom. As it is transitioning from its mercantilist past into its capitalist future, the first thing that has to go is what? Slavery. And it's not an accident that the thriving, industrious, productive, capitalist North rejects slavery and ultimately is willing to spite a civil war in order to eliminate it completely from the American economy. And the last countries to eliminate slavery, at least in the Americas, are places like Brazil. And Argentina was a lot richer than Brazil, even though it had, I don't know if it had any slaves, but if it had slaves, a lot fewer. Brazil should have been massively richer. Slavery is so good economically. If slavery leads to capitalism, then why didn't? Slave economies like Haiti, slave economies like Brazil, the Caribbean's, why didn't they become capitalist? And why didn't they become rich? No, slavery is the antithesis of capitalism. Capitalism is a system of freedom. Capitalism is a system of individual rights. Capitalism does not view individuals as means to an ends, but ends in themselves. Capitalism is a system to protect the individuals, right to make choices, voluntary choices for himself, good or bad choices. As long as he doesn't violate the rights of others, he is free to pursue his life based on his values, based on his ideas, his thinking. That's inconsistent with slavery as the founding documents of the United States are inconsistent with slavery. It's why it cannot survive, and why Southern intellectuals, as Brad Thompson in his book illustrates, as Southern intellectuals turned against the Declaration of Independence and against the Constitution in their attempt to defend slavery because they understood that the Constitution and certainly the Declaration were anti-slavery documents. It was inconsistent, and therefore civil war had to happen. So the whole project that Sam and these new historians of Capitalism, they all start with Marx's premise. They all start with the idea of the evil of Capitalism. And then it's just a matter of finding, and if you can't find them making up connections, facts, relationships in order to show it. And if history is a tool, then they'll use history. The Industrial Revolution is not, and this is an important point. One of the points they make is that it's the wealth that slavery created that made possible. The investment in technology and everything else during the Industrial Revolution. But it's not, didgeridoo McCluskey makes this point brilliantly. And of course, Iran makes this point in an ultimate way. It is not Capital that drives Capitalism. It is not Capital that drives Capitalism. It is not Capital that created the Industrial Revolution. It is not Capitalism. It is not Capital, sorry. That created the steam engine. It is not Capital that created the factories. The increased productivity, flights, railroads, airplanes, computer chips, CRISPR. Now Capital is necessary for all of those to have the positive impact they have on our lives. But what makes all those things possible? What makes economic growth possible? What makes economic success possible? What makes Capitalism possible? Is the human mind, its ideas, its innovation, its ingenuity, and for those ideas to flourish, you need freedom. So it's a political institution of freedom combined with a respect for human reason, which allows then for individuals to come up with ideas, to innovate, to increase productivity, to bring those ideas into reality, to raise the Capital, to hire the employees, to build the factories. But it is freedom and reason that make it all possible. Without a respect for reason in a religious society, Capital would be useless. Freedom would only go so far. But it's the respect for reason combined with freedom that make, create wealth. And then that Capital facilitates, helps that wealth creation. But without ideas, nothing happens. Without ideas, without ideas and the freedom to live those ideas, the freedom to execute those ideas, nothing happens. As Deirdre calls it, it's a permissionless society. That's what we got in the early part of the 19th century and that's what generated the amazing prosperity of Capitalism. Not slavery, slavery did the exact opposite, slavery slowed it down. America would be so much richer today without slavery. 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 slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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