[Christian_Capitalist]

To: TitansAFC This is so stupid it's a wonder the guy can walk and chew gum at the same time. In a confined market of scarce goods (slaves), the price of each REMAINING good goes up as you take an additional good off the market. Thus, if the first slave cost the government $100, the 10th could cost $10,000, and the 100th . . . well, you get it. Since the ONLY way you can force people to sell is by, well, force, we're back to a war.

This is not true.

The money price of any slave, would never go above the money value of the labor which could be extracted from that slave. A slave-holder would not pay a million dollars for a slave which would only deliver $20,000 in labor value over his lifetime. This "upward bound" on the money value of each slave is one of the reasons why Compensated Emancipation worked in other slave-holding countries, and why every slave-holding Western nation except the USA was able to end slavery without a war.

• At an average price of $1,000 per slave (a very generous estimate, by 1860 standards), it would have cost approximately $3 Billion dollars to purchase and emancipate every slave in the US.

• In point of fact, the Civil War cost $6 Billion dollars and 600,000 lives. (This does not count the economic value of the destruction caused to the south, or the lost monetary earnings from 600,000 dead)

Ergo, in principle, Ron Paul is right.
Even a very generous Compensated Emancipation program would have cost the USA half the money, none of the economic damage, and none of the 600,000 dead.

[LS]

Absolutely and totally wrong. Every economist who has studied this has concluded that slaves had an inherent property value far, far above their labor value. This is not in debate among the economic historians who have written on this. Only goofballs like DiLorenzo still try to make this silly argument.