Aside from its moral evil, the practice was a hindrance to prosperity, population growth, and industrial development.
Free-market economics assumes that people and private institutions will generally pursue their own self-interest, at least as they understand it. But not every act of self-interest advances the goal of free-market economies to harness the power of that self-interest through voluntary exchanges. In order to fully unleash the potential of free exchanges, a free-market economy requires some basic rules of the road to prohibit certain kinds of self-interested private acts. These include theft, fraud, breach of contract — and enslavement. This is a fit subject to consider on Juneteenth.
The distinction between private self-interest and the interests of the economy as a whole tends to elude left-wingers, and that has consequences for their reading of history. Thus, we see the 1619 Project, the reparations movement, and other forms of left-wing history claim that the American founding and the economic growth of the country were based upon slavery. It is certainly true that slavery benefited individual slave-owners. And it can quite reasonably be argued that there were times and places where the shortage of free labor was acute enough that slavery was a net creator of wealth. But, on balance, slavery had a great many economic drawbacks even aside from its moral evil. Slaves work only as hard as they are compelled to, have little incentive to innovate, don’t become consumers or investors, and don’t accumulate wealth of their own. Slave-owners have fewer incentives to develop technological alternatives to labor that is nearly free. Slave labor forces also require the diversion of a lot of resources into keeping the slaves enslaved. And artificially cheap labor takes jobs away from free workers, who languish outside the gates of the plantations. In the 1850s, the free-labor Republican Party united the moral, religious, political, and economic critiques of slavery, emphasizing that the free states were rocketing ahead of the South in prosperity, population growth, and industrial development. The Civil War would test each system’s capacity to produce, and freedom won.
James Pethokoukis has a great newsletter today on how the emancipation of the slaves wasn’t just a moral victory — it also helped unleash the great economic boom of the second half of the 19th century. He cites recent research:
Economists Richard Hornbeck (University of Chicago) and Trevon Logan (Ohio State University) acknowledge the widespread view of slavery as economically productive in their 2023 paper, “One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains.”…“Indeed, we calculate that emancipation generated economic gains that exceed estimated costs of the Civil War,” the researchers write. “Economic gains from emancipation are comparable to those from the largest increases in aggregate productivity in American history.”… “[We] have sought to quantify the value of freedom to those who were freed — the wealth created by reallocating 13% of the population from slave labor to using their time as they saw fit. We found that the benefit to the formerly enslaved far exceeded the associated declines in output of cotton and other relevant goods. So instead of destroying wealth, emancipation actually delivered the largest positive productivity shock in U.S. history. Under conservative assumptions about the value of non-working time to enslaved people, we estimate that the productivity gain was roughly 10% to 20% of gross domestic product.” [Emphasis added]