Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Slavery Made the US Less Prosperous, Not More So

Reparations are a nonsensical idea, a Unicorn wish horse which would do much harm. The goal is to retrospectively compensate the slave for his "incarceration" and his wages. But there are none living who were American slaves. On the other hand, the idea is to require those who gained the benefit of slavery to make the payment, but, likewise, there are no living slave owners. 

So, what seems to be the goal is to force payment of money from one group, many or even most of whom had no relationship to American slavery, to another group many of whom will also not have had any relationship to American slavery. 

The only sensible model would be to tie these groups via some logical connection which continues to exist today. So, those who can prove their heritage is greater than a specific percentage slave, say 50% should be able to recover from the group or groups of people who fought for slavery, which is the Democratic Party. 

Trump should propose something like this. 

Let the fireworks begin. 

"This notion that slavery somehow benefited the entire economy is a surprisingly common one and I want to briefly refute it.  This is related to the ridiculously bad academic study (discussed here) that slave-harvested cotton accounted for nearly half of the US's economic activity, when in fact the number was well under 10%.  I assume that activists in support of reparations are using this argument to make the case that all Americans, not just slaveholders, benefited from slavery.  But this simply is not the case.

At the end of the day, economies grow and become wealthier as labor and capital are employed more productively.  Slavery does exactly the opposite.

Slaves are far less productive that free laborers.  They have no incentive to do any more work than the absolute minimum to avoid punishment, and have zero incentive (and a number of disincentives) to use their brain to perform tasks more intelligently.  So every slave is a potentially productive worker converted into an unproductive one.  Thus, every dollar of capital invested in a slave was a dollar invested in reducing worker productivity.

As a bit of background, the US in the early 19th century had a resource profile opposite from the old country.  In Europe, labor was over-abundant and land and resources like timber were scarce.  In the US, land and resources were plentiful but labor was scarce.  For landowners, it was really hard to get farm labor because everyone who came over here would quickly quit their job and headed out to the edge of settlement and grabbed some land to cultivate for themselves.

In this environment the market was sending pretty clear pricing signals -- that it was simply not a good use of scarce labor resources to grow low margin crops on huge plantations requiring scores or hundreds of laborers.  Slave-owners circumvented this pricing signal by finding workers they could force to work for free.  Force was used to apply high-value labor to lower-value tasks.  This does not create prosperity, it destroys it.

As a result, whereas $1000 invested in the North likely improved worker productivity, $1000 invested in the South destroyed it.  The North poured capital into future prosperity. The South poured it into supporting a dead-end feudal plantation economy.  As a result the south was impoverished for a century, really until northern companies began investing in the South after WWII.  If slavery really made for so much of an abundance of opportunities, then why did very few immigrants in the 19th century go to the South?  They went to the industrial northeast or (as did my grandparents) to the midwest.  The US in the 19th century was prosperous despite slavery in the south, not because of it."

Slavery is a primer on how to make an economy as unproductive as possible. So, the rest of us should also be able to sue the Dems and other modern progressives to recover this massive deadweight loss. Cool. 

Today the Demsa and other progressives continue to follow the same conceptual policies they followed under slavery. In the past, Dems followed a policy which guaranteed minimal human productivity from the group of slaves. Today they follow policies which keep lower class and inner city Americans on what amounts to a Democratic Party voting plantation. Welfare has replaced slavery but has similar productivity destroying effects. To be fair, the old Dems were pikers, since they paid slaves a minimal amount in food, clothing, shoes, healthcare, and housing for a minimal amount of work, while they destroyed productivity, some productivity remained. 

Today the progressive politicians pay the poor through welfare for all of the same things, but the payments are far greater. The progressives constantly pursue policies to ensure that the poor do not have to work, so the policies do not just erode productivity; they eliminate it. In the olden days, the piker Dems of yore provided minuscule payments in return for small productivity. Today progressives take our money to provide huge payments for zero productivity. They call this improvement. 

We need reparations from the Dems and other progressives to the rest of the nation. 

Warren nails it when he notes that the plantation economy was an American cut at the old feudal socio-economic model. Slavery was even more brutal than serfdom, although only fractionally. 

Today the progressive model continues to impose new feudalism wherever it can. At the heart of the mind of the socialist/progressive is a desire to enslave the rest so they can become one of the new aristocrats. They believe the economic fallacy that the pie is set and cannot be expanded. These people must be ignored now, and forever, whenever they are discovered since their policies, and goals are utterly destructive of the human soul, the economy, the polity, everything. 

Following progressivism, or socialism or any of its siblings is a recipe for a return to brutal feudalism and serfdom. 

Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake "Science" Of Human-Caused Global Warming

Nor should I forget to watch Tony Heller's videos. 

Tony Heller​

You Don't Need To Be A Scientist To Know That The Global Warming Alarm "Science" Is Fake

"Here is the very simple check.  When confronted with a claim that a scientific proposition has been definitively proven, ask the question:  What was the null hypothesis, and on what basis has it been rejected?

Consider first a simple example, the question of whether aspirin cures headaches.  Make that our scientific proposition: aspirin cures headaches.  How would this proposition be established?  You yourself have taken aspirin many times, and your headache always went away.  Doesn’t that prove that the aspirin worked?  Absolutely not.  The fact that you took aspirin 100 times and the headache went away 100 times proves nothing.  Why?  Because there is a null hypothesis that must first be rejected.  Here the null hypothesis is that headaches will go away just as quickly on their own.  How do you reject that?  The standard method is to take some substantial number of people with headaches, say 2000, and give half of them the aspirin and the other half a placebo.  Two hours later, of the 1000 who took the aspirin, 950 feel better and only 50 still have the headache; and of the 1000 who took the placebo, 500 still have the headache.  Now you have very, very good proof that aspirin cured the headaches.

The point to focus on is that the most important evidence — the only evidence that really proves causation — is the evidence that requires rejection of the null hypothesis.  

Over to climate science.  Here you are subject to a constant barrage of information designed to convince you of the definitive relationship between human carbon emissions and global warming.  The world temperature graph is shooting up in hockey stick formation!  Arctic sea ice is disappearing!  The rate of sea level rise is accelerating!  Hurricanes are intensifying!  June was the warmest month EVER!  And on and on and on.  All of this is alleged to be “consistent” with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming.

But, what is the null hypothesis, and on what basis has it been rejected?  Here the null hypothesis is that some other factor, or combination of factors, rather than human carbon emissions, was the dominant cause of the observed warming.  

Once you pose the null hypothesis, you immediately realize that all of the scary climate information with which you are constantly barraged does not even meaningfully address the relevant question.  All of that information is just the analog of your 100 headaches that went away after you took aspirin.  How do you know that those headaches wouldn’t have gone away without the aspirin?  You don’t know unless someone presents data that are sufficient to reject the null hypothesis.  Proof of causation can only come from disproof of the null hypothesis or hypotheses, that is, disproof of other proposed alternative causes.  This precept is fundamental to the scientific method, and therefore fully applies to “climate science” to the extent that that field wishes to be real science versus fake science.

Now, start applying this simple check to every piece you read about climate science.  Start looking for the null hypothesis and how it was supposedly rejected.  In mainstream climate literature — and I’m including here both the highbrow media like the New York Times and also the so-called “peer reviewed” scientific journals like Nature and Science — you won’t find that.  It seems that people calling themselves “climate scientists” today have convinced themselves that their field is such “settled science” that they no longer need to bother with tacky questions like worrying about the null hypothesis.

The centrality of focusing on the null hypothesis is the reason that studies like those covered in my last post (“Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake ‘Science’ Of Human-Caused Global Warming,” July 12) are so important.  Is there some other factor that could plausibly be causing global warming that more closely correlates with observed temperatures?  How about clouds?  Or ocean circulations (El Niño/La Niña)?  Or volcanic activity?

When climate scientists start addressing the alternative hypotheses seriously, then it will be real science.  In the meantime, it’s fake science.  

A final word about my favorite subject, the ongoing systematic alteration of the world’s surface temperature (ground thermometer-based) records.  Readers here are undoubtedly familiar with my now 23 part series, The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.  The alteration of the surface temperature records only relates to making the surface temperature record correlate more closely with the increase in atmospheric CO2.  As noted in the Wallace, et al., May 2018 paper, without the alterations, the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and the surface temperature record is low.  In other words, without faking the data, they can’t even show consistency between atmospheric CO2 and temperature increase.  And that’s before even getting to dealing with problem of the null hypotheses."      

Good luck finding the non-existent climate science null hypothesis. And, no, it is not Fake Science, it is religion plain and simple. Climate science is a cult. 

Read all of his work on climate science here:

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time

The Rapid Fall of the Left

Until the ultimate sentence, then the author steps into a hole, but, hey, you can't have everything!

"A few short years ago, the far left was resurgent. Fringe politicians such as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, and France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon were turning into the standard-bearers of the mainstream left. Meanwhile, in the United States, Bernie Sanders was staging a surprisingly robust primary challenge against Hillary Clinton, the anointed heir to the Democratic Party.

Progressive commentators, activists, and politicians argued that the far left was about to conquer Europe, and that the best way forward for Democrats was to ride the red wave to victory. “Jeremy Corbyn has given us a blueprint to follow for years to come,” wrote Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin. Representative Ro Khanna, the leader of the Justice Democrats in the House, argued that the populist message adopted by leftist leaders in Europe “is not just morally right—it’s also strategically smart.”

But reports of socialism’s resurrection were greatly exaggerated. Recent electoral defeats in Europe suggest that the much-heralded red wave crested before it reached the shore.

For decades, the European left was dominated by moderate social democrats. Though the far left had a minor presence in most European parliaments, and many establishment parties contained radical currents within them, it was the moderates who ultimately called the shots.

Then came the Great Recession. With the old guard spent or discredited, and voters longing for a new start, those traditional power relations were upended. The first sign of the new era came in January 2015 when Syriza, a party forged from a potpourri of leftist splinter groups, won national elections at the height of Greece’s devastating currency crisis. The party’s young leader, Alexis Tsipras, became the first far-left politician in decades to head a western European government.

That summer, Corbyn took over Britain’s Labour Party on the promise of breaking with the “neoliberal” policies of his predecessors. By the end of the year, Pablo Iglesias, a young Marxist academic, had succeeded in turning an inchoate protest movement into one of Spain’s biggest parties. And when Emmanuel Macron’s election obliterated France’s traditional parties in the spring of 2017, Mélenchon, a hard-liner with close connections to a variety of communist factions, became the de facto leader of that country’s left.

These upsets seemed to demonstrate that the far left had greater electoral potential than previously recognized. But in the excitement, many observers failed to absorb that these victories mostly consisted of a reordering of power within the left, rather than a triumph over the right. Even in Greece, the one case where the left did manage to win a general election, it needed the support of a far-right populist party to form a government. A big question thus hung over the success of these new leaders: Would they be able to retain the loyalty of their most ardent fans, and expand the ranks of their supporters, once the public got to know them better?

The first serious sign of trouble came in late May, when elections for the European Parliament provided a snapshot of the far left’s standing across the continent. In Spain, Podemos, down to 10 percent of the vote, was eclipsed by the PSOE, its center-left competitor. In France, Mélenchon sank to 6 percent. Other far-left parties in countries from Germany to Italy posted similarly disappointing results.

Corbyn, the European leader most heralded as a harbinger of the future by leftist cheerleaders in the United States, has met with an even more radical reversal: He now ranks as one of Britain’s least popular politicians. The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had once looked mortally wounded by its participation in an unpopular coalition with the Conservatives, beat Labour in the European elections, and might just be able to repeat that performance in the next general elections. One recent poll even raised the possibility that Corbyn could then lose his own seat, a constituency in central London that Labour has held since before World War II.

Sunday’s elections in Greece provide the strongest indication to date that the left is now in deep crisis: Less than four years after he took office, Tsipras has been swept aside by New Democracy, the center-right party that has governed the country for much of the past 40 years.
With the benefit of hindsight, there may be a simple explanation for the rapid rise and rapid fall of the far left: Its appeal was always more negative than positive.

When Tsipras unexpectedly won power in 2015, he came to office on a political program riddled with contradictions: He styled himself as a left-wing revolutionary, but relied on right-wing support for his parliamentary majority. He promised to ignore the demands of the country’s creditors, but assured his compatriots that Greece would stay within the single currency zone. He vowed to do away with the special interests that have long strangled Greece’s public and economic life, but never implemented real reform measures.

So long as Tsipras remained in opposition, his incoherence mattered less than the apparent authenticity of his anger. But once he came to power, his inability to deliver alienated Greeks on all ends of the political spectrum.

Corbyn’s Labour Party has never gotten the chance to prove its competence or incompetence in government. But it too is weakened by incoherence. Corbyn remains instinctively opposed to international institutions such as the European Union at a time when many in the Labour Party are passionately opposed to Brexit. As a result, Corbyn has failed to take a clear stance on the most important political issue of the day, trying to stay true to his euroskeptic instincts without alienating his increasingly Europhile base—and succeeding only in alienating both.

Perhaps Corbyn wasn’t so popular because he promised to nationalize the railways or declared his lasting solidarity with Fidel Castro and Nicolás Maduro, but because he could credibly claim to be a pain in the establishment’s neck. And perhaps Sanders did so well in 2016 not because Democratic primary voters were desperate for an avowed socialist, but because he was the only real alternative to Clinton.

In the wake of a massive economic crisis, the far left was given a rare opportunity to move from the fringes to the mainstream by channeling the anti-establishment fervor of ordinary voters. The past years have shown that the task of sustaining that initial surge of support is far harder than the movement’s most bullish cheerleaders recognize. If American leftists want to fare better than their European comrades, they urgently need to take note."


The point missed in this is that the progressive political movement is dead and has turned into a mass movement. This is why the old leftist progressive political guard is having such a difficult time, and we are seeing a new younger group who behave like cultists, not like those in a political movement. 

AOC and her fellow cultists are winning over the Pelosi/Schumer Ancien Regime. The only question is who will play Robespierre? 

We stand at the edge of a great transition, which will change politics, economics, work, employment, family, and pretty much everything we know and understand. When change descends, it is like a great mist which we cannot see through. Our goals become amorphous and obscure, as does our desired direction. In such case, it seems best to simply double down on the old models which worked so well for so long. And so after Reagan, we doubled down on progressivism.

We know now that was the wrong path. College does not work any longer; work and employment are fraught. It is easy to be swayed into believing that the appropriate step is to move further in the direction that the progressive movement took us in the beginning, to the left. 

The Obama years taught us that following the progressive path further to the left is death by stagnation. Eight years of death by stagnation was plenty for Americans, but not plenty for the Europeans. The Southern Europeans will not leave the EU monetary union because they so keenly remember the halcyon days before the Great Recession turned into the Great Southern European Depression. Enjoy your stagnation.

The step left was a failed if a logical attempt to find our way out of the mist and towards our goal. It failed, and now we will need to take another step, Trump offered middle America a step in a new direction. That step has proven to be positive, the economy turned, and the mist thinned. Middle America can now make out a goal worth pursuing in the dim distance. 

And those on the progressive left can make out the same goal, a goal they abhor. The progressive left does not want middle Americans to find America the glorious city on the hill; they want to keep us mired deep in the mist, as serfs wed to the progressive model.

All of their goals and dreams will be dashed if we leave the mist and ascend the hill to America, the glorious city on the hill. And so they fight, scream, spin-off Antifa fascists who will stop at nothing to stop us. 

 We will not be stopped; we cannot be stopped. 

Even Europe has seen this and is taking a renewed look at whether they are heading in the right direction. The big difference in the European mindset is that the Europeans are much more accepting of authoritarian rule, while Americans are not. 

The fate of America, Europe, and the world depends upon our leaving the mist and ascending the hill. If the Europeans come, they may survive; if they do not, they will be replaced. 

I continue to believe that we need an existential conflict to finally fracture the progressive model so we can break free and move forward. I hope not, but history shows we do. 

The next two decades will be interesting. 

Elizabeth Warren’s Dirigiste Plan for Wall Street


"If you want specifics on her plan, this Politico story has lots of detail, and this CNN report also has plenty of information.

I’ve previously written about some of the provisions, such as Glass-Steagall and carried interest, so today I want to focus on the broader point from the interview.

Every single economic theory agrees that saving and investment play a key role in long-run growth and higher living standards. But who controls and directs how capital is allocated?

I prefer competitive markets, which reward decisions that make us more prosperous.

The socialists, by contrast, think government can directly control how capital is allocated. At the risk of understatement, that approach doesn’t have a good track record.

Elizabeth Warren prefers an indirect approach, which involves lots of regulation, taxation, red tape, and intervention. This cronyist approach also is misguided. Her corporatist agenda unavoidably will hinder the efficient (i.e., growth maximizing) allocation of capital and also reduce the overall level of saving and investment.

And that translates into less income for workers."

Warren wants to follow the Barak Obama approach to socialist government, and we know where that leads a gasping economy which is indistinguishable from an agonal breathing economy. Trump's decisions to cut red tape, regulation, and taxes all have caused the economy to thrive. Obama's policies and decisions left the economy comatose and on life support. 

Choose wisely in the coming election. 

Quickies: Predictions Versus Reality

For progressives, this has become the norm, fabricate reality, live life accordingly. This is the consequences of DCing faith. Humans need to believe, and so we do, if not within the frame of reformed religion, most commonly in an unreformed secular cult. Secular cults are the most dangerous of cults since they do not have even a hint of ethical standards, and the end goal is always more valuable than any single human life. The result is always the same, mass murder, and uncountable death. 

Trump forces democrats to embrace the “Squad” as they liken Israel to Nazi Germany

Trump's tweet has triggered the Democrats to embrace the most toxic of their members, "The Squad." Until now, Pelosi and Schumer have been able to kick these fools back into play, allowing them to create chaos while never formally embracing them. That was then, this is now, and the Dems are now forced to embrace the most disliked members of Congress as their own. 

Trump has proven amazing in his ability to brand others and paint them into corners. By 2020 he will likely have branded everyone running on the Democratic Party ticket as American haters a la "The Squad."

I've never seen anything like this in American politics, world politics for that matter. 

Middle America will determine the next three to four Presidential election cycles. The Dems are staking out a shrinking position, and it does not appear they are or will soon be willing to change their tactics or policies. Once this trajectory is set, even a less capable man, than Trump will be able to control the outcome. 

Amazing.  

The Selfish Actors of Illegal Immigration — Torches and Pitchforks

As a consequence, hundreds die due to the attractive nuisance the Selfish Actors of Illegal Immigration create. In a normal society, this would result in charges of negligent homicide and extensive civil lawsuits. 

By the bye, is there an attorney willing to take the case for the families of those who have died after being attracted to this venture, there are millions to be made suing the various deep pocket miscreants. 

Opinion | Can Ilhan Omar Overcome Her Prejudice?

The only solution outside of a catastrophic war and deNazification, excuse me, deIslamization, is reformation and enlightenment. Anyone who knows anything about the history of WWII understands the need for Muslims to understand the problem and address it via reformation and enlightenment. Pray for peace, prepare for war, political leaders like the mad mullahs are too stupid to pay attention to history. 

"I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.

Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.

Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.

...

In any event, I am living proof that one can be born a Somali, raised as an anti-Semite, indoctrinated as an anti-Zionist—and still overcome all this to appreciate the unique culture of Judaism and the extraordinary achievement of the state of Israel. If I can make that leap, so perhaps can Ms. Omar. Yet that is not really the issue at stake. For she and I are only two individuals. The real question is what, if anything, can be done to check the advance of the mass movement that is Muslim anti-Semitism. Absent a world-wide Muslim reformation, followed by an Islamic enlightenment, I am not sure I know."

​Thanks: Quotation of the day on whether Rep. Ilhan Omar can overcome her prejudice…..

Why are the progressive left so angry…. and so ungrateful?

The progressive movement is collapsing. The progressive are angry because they see that they cannot win anymore but do not understand what is happening. The result is vast inchoate anger and frustration. They lash out because they believe their political positions are right, yet they continually lose politically. 

The answer in their minds is that the American people, the American system must be at fault; they must be the problem. 

This is the response of a three-year-old child or a cultist facing the collapse of the cult. 

At least the Democrats and progressives can move from one stage of loss to another. The 5 Stages of Grief & Loss

They have now moved from denial to anger, but in this case, the anger is violent and unconstrained, so it is dangerous.

Let the bargaining begin!

What comes after the collapse of the progressive movement? I don't know. Whatever it is, it will be much better, it will distribute wealth better, more efficiently and mostly to those who are productive and work hard. Also, the corruption of the progressive model will be greatly reduced. 

The only issue is will the progressives be able to create sufficient confusion to leave the long-dead progressive model intact for another decade or more. If they do, it will be a new Dark Ages, if they cannot it will be a new Enlightenment.

Let's get on with it.