Please.
Seriously.
Tell me that this is an April Fool’s joke done in the poorest taste imaginable.
Either way, at the risk of giving myself a headache, here’s the answer...
I am in no way speaking of the moral imperative of divesting oneself of the ownership of other human beings, and am limiting myself to just the economic factors. There is no moral justification for declaring ownership over another human being, but it made a certain sort of sense from an economic view.
Just to humor Ron Paul, lets say that on Monday morning, every single slave owner in the south decided to sell every single slave at 5:00 PM to the highest bidder.
At 5:00 PM, the slaves are sold and are taken to the north where they are freed. Slavery is outlawed.
Problem solved, right?
No. Because come Tuesday morning, the cotton will still need to be picked and the crops will still need to be planted, and the hay will still need to be bailed, and so on.
Even if the North had paid twice the going rate, that would have spelled the instantaneous end of much of the economy of the South. There wouldn’t have been enough free workers (i.e., people who were qualified to do skilled labor and who weren’t former slaves) to go around, and those which existed would have been able to charge whatever they liked for their services.
If the slaves were sold at 5:00 PM, but slavery somehow wasn’t outlawed, southerners would have simply imported more slaves and nothing much would have changed.
Slave holders were unwilling to lose everything and completely wreck their economy. It was that simple.
Again, regardless of how much economic sense it seemed to make, nothing made the status quo (slave ownership) morally correct.
Why would they be "taken" to the North? What right would the North have to forcibly displace free men?
Rather, with something like $3 Billion in monetary capital from Compensated Emancipation floating around the South and looking for Labor, it's probable that most blacks would have remained in the South and gotten jobs. Employed in agriculture again for the most part, sure; but as free men.