[Christian_Capitalist]

My point was that that little law in the US Constitution would not have deterred a people who were set on slavery to the point of seceding from the US and forsaking that very same Constitution. A group of people who so objected to the Constitution that they wanted to return to the Articles of Confederation, would have, had the North bought all slaves, simply bought more slaves. If the North tried to impose the law on them, they would have seceded and said they no longer abided by the USC.

Compensated Emancipation, in every nation where it was tried, naturally included a moratorium on buying any new slaves which the slave-holders (having received their compensation) did actually respect.

The South was not so much "set on Slavery" as "set on the enormous monetary investment they'd made in Slavery" (money which had largely been paid to Yankee slave-traders in exchange for Slaves). Had a market-rate compensation been paid -- it's entirely probable that plantation owners, newly flush with Compensated Emancipation money and needing Labor, would have just hired black freedmen for cash wages rather than risk almost-certain imprisonment for importing new slaves.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

They would have hired back freed blacks at a higher wage?

And they were already losing economically to the North who employed their own version of slave labor?

I don’t think this would have worked.

The slave-like labor conditions of the North are very little discussed, because the Left wants to hold that region up as some sort of moral hotbed. But the fact of the matter is that many Northern industrialists wanted to destroy their Southern competition through the slavery issue.

The South could not have followed the route you outlines because they would have failed economically even faster than under their slave system.

[libertarian27]

I haven’t read all these comments but does that mean Ron Paul was For ‘Cash for Clunkers’?

Isn’t that the same type of theory?