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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 29, 2024

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The greatest conceit in human history is the notion that one person can determine what makes other people happy. The Declaration of Independence said ‘the pursuit of’ for a reason. When people talk about ‘happiness indexes,’ they are not talking about happiness. They are talking about control.

The CO2-free utopia the left promises ⏤ should we stop using fossil fuels ⏤ does not exist, and nor does the apocalyptic future the left claims will occur if we continue using fossil fuels. The truth is that the cost of fossil fuel use is infinitesimally small when compared to the costs of everything proposed to get us off fossil fuels, whereas wealth is impossible without abundant cheap and reliable energy ⏤ which you can only have if you use fossil fuels.

Climate alarmism is not about the climate at all ⏤ it is about control.

The difference between inclusion and equity sounds small, but it is actually an insurmountable chasm. These words are essentially opposites ⏤ you cannot possibly have both.

Inclusion means everyone gets a shot ⏤ that there are no artificial barriers holding anyone back. An inclusive society allows everyone to go as far as they can.

Equity means that everyone gets the same outcome, which can only be accomplished by creating artificial barriers to hold back those who would otherwise be successful.

Inclusion allows failure, but it also allows success, and failing once does not mean failing all the time, whereas equity sacrifices success in order to avoid failure.

Without any opportunity to succeed, there is also no incentive to produce, so until someone figures out a way to distribute that which is not produced, equity will always be a path to starvation.

But who truly wants equity? Nancy Pelosi and her $60,000 ice cream freezer? Bernie Sanders and his six houses? AOC, who makes more than 95% of Americans and complains about how little she is paid?

There are of course people who truly believe in building an equitable society, but everyone in a position of power who wants equity also finds excuses to exclude themselves from it.

If everyone is equally poor except the leadership, that is not equity ⏤ it is serfdom. As such, equity is not about making people equal. It is about control.

There are two basic kinds of societies, and every society on Earth fits in somewhere between these two extremes:

1) Each person owns their own productive capacity and can do with it as they wish, and

2) The productive capacities of all people are the property of some elite group, and the elite can use the productive capacity of the people however the elite wish.

The pyramids were built with the second kind of society, as was the Soviet Union. Europe used the second kind of society until it ended serfdom (which in the case of Russia was not until 1861). The plantation system of the Antebellum South ran on the second system.

Even in the Northern states, slavery existed at the founding of our nation. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to end slavery ⏤ four years after the Declaration of Independence declared that ‘all men are created equal, with certain unalienable rights’. It was in fact this very thought, embodied in a document written by a slave owner, that inspired Pennsylvania, and eventually the world to abolish slavery.

Which of these two kinds of society was the United States upon its founding? The answer to that question probably depended on who you were when the United States was founded.

For the majority of people, the United States was founded as the kind of society where each person owned their own productive capacity and was free to do with their productive capacity as they wished, but in 1790 19% of the US population was slaves. For them, this was not a free country at all.

People like simple answers, so most people look at America’s history of slavery either by downplaying it, or by focusing solely on it. Neither is fair. True history is often more complicated.

Take Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. He took one essentially as his second wife ⏤ and she had no say in the matter. He owned slaves his entire life, and did not free them when he died.

At the same time, Thomas Jefferson was an abolitionist who in 1778 drafted a law in Virginia to ban the importation of slaves (it did not pass), and then in 1807 successfully banned the importation of slaves throughout the United States.

The plantation system ran on debt. Plantation owners took out loans to fund the spring planting season, and then paid those loans off (if they were able) after the fall harvest. The primary sources of collateral were the slaves, and as a consequence, plantation owners could not legally free their slaves, even if they wanted to, unless they were able to get out of debt and build up enough wealth to fund a planting season without borrowing again. Even if a plantation owner could do all of that, freeing their slaves would mean having higher costs than other plantation owners, which would mean losing money and going out of business such that some other plantation owner could take their land and run it using slaves.

Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner who abhorred slavery, but who understood that the economy of the Antebellum South ran on it, and that slavery could only be abolished by banning it outright – and in the Antebellum South, the political will to do that just did not exist.

Thomas Jefferson’s history with slavery is complicated, as is the nation’s. Just as with climate alarmism, with the ability to define ‘happiness’ for other people, and with the notion of ‘equity’, slavery was about control. Understanding our history with slavery is imperative to understand what kind of a nation our founders aspired for us to be, and we have to get that understanding right if we are ever going to build a better society for our children. 

Far from being the nation that created slavery ⏤ as many today seem to believe ⏤ the founding of the United States began the process of ending slavery throughout the world. Before Thomas Jefferson wrote the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” slavery was so common and considered so normal, everywhere on Earth, that it had not even occurred to any society to consider ending it, but as soon as people read, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they began to ask, “what about the slaves?”

The Declaration of Independence started the conversation that ended slavery.

Our founding principles also caused the fastest rate of growth in per capita GDP, and in the working and living conditions of the working class, in human history.

If it were true that our country was built on slavery, or that slavery is the cause of our wealth today, then the rates of growth in slave-holding states would have exceeded that of free states, and yet ALL of the growth ⏤ the fastest growth in human history ⏤ was in free States. Slave-holding states had zero per capita GDP growth. Zero, as in ‘nada,’ or ‘none’. As crazy as it is to think about, the United States had the fastest rate of growth in per capita GDP when a large portion of the country had no per capita GDP growth at all. Far from propelling those states into wealth and riches, slavery was an albatross around the Antebellum South’s collective neck.

Slavery was NOT the cause of America’s wealth. Freedom was. Note that ALL of the per capita GDP growth in the South occurred after the Civil War, and that though the South has made great strides in that growth, overall the South is still poorer than the North, even today. That is because of its history with slavery.

The North was about freedom, and the South was about control.

Had the Civil War been fought in 1800, the South would have won. It was because the people in the Northern States were truly free that their economy exploded, and by the 1860s the North was able to defeat the South.

The left does not have a post-racial utopia to offer, but a tribalized society of identity groups that cannot possibly get along, and that can only be held together by totalitarian force.

The left was and continues to be, the party of control.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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j.bell
j.bell
2 years ago

The ‘good’ Professor Garneau states, ‘Slavery was NOT the cause of America’s wealth’. He has iterated this in several postings. I would like to remind him, you can’t divorce the plantation system from the Atlantic slave trade itself. Supply and demand, means and ends.

A fair number of American colonial merchants got their start in the involved with the triangular slave trade.

“Slave captains who became merchants in North America include Godfrey Mallbone and Peleg Clarke in Newport and James de Wolf in Bristol, Rhode Island along with Joseph Grafton in Salem, Massachusetts …….. the splendid mansions of Nicolas and John Brown in Ower Street in Providence, George de Wolf (Linden Place) in Bristol, or the Vernon family in Clarke Street , Newport are still visited, even if Philip Livingston’s house in Duke Street NY has vanished”.—-in the book, “The Slave Trade”, by Hugh Thomas, 293 and 295

“By 1750 Newport, the chief port of Rhode Island, is said to have 170 – or half of its merchant fleet – engaged in slave trading…….for New Jersey (the middle colony with the smallest importation of slaves) between 1718 and 1757, 28 vessels arrived with 611 slaves: seven with 206 slaves from Leeward, seven with 107 from Barbados…three with 204 from Africa.”—‘Sinews of Empire -A Short History of British Slavery’, by Michael Craton

More colonial American wealth from the slave trade.

“Rhode Island merchants seem to have concentrated their trade at Sierra Leone, the Windward Coasts, and the Gold Coast…this trade was founded largely on the exchange of one item-New England rum ……. (in 1791) there were 80,000 gallons of rum for sale on that coast alone”, in the article, ‘West African Consumption Patterns’, by David Richardson, in the book, ‘The Uncommon Market, by Gemery Hogendorn

Burp, could I have a little bit more of that Rhode Island brew please, if you don’t mind. More American wealth.

Yes, good hard working colonial White people in the North, not like the rascal White Southerners. You’ve been bought with a price, at Calvary.

From — East Austin, Texas

bell # 2
bell # 2
Reply to  Wallace Garneau
2 years ago

More than INDIVIDUALs benefitted..
“New England trade with the West Indies, Wine Islands and the Iberian peninsular proved its economic salvation during the remainder of the colonial  period, more than 70 percent of New England’s export were shipped to the slave plantations of the West indies…..some two thirds of the of the regions ‘invisibles’ (earnings from the carrying trade ) derived from West Indian commerce”—‘Creating the Commonwealth’, by Stephen Innes   p. 297  The ‘salvation’ of new England, the triangular trade with the Carribean. More American wealth not garnered by American slavery, but profiting off some other country’s enslavement of Africans. 
“So the first thing to understand about slavery in Newtown was that it was integrated into the triangle trade where people were taken from Africa as slaves and transported to the plantations in the West Indies, where sugar and molasses from those plantations were sent to Connecticut, and where food, animals, and timber from Connecticut were sent to the plantations. Connecticut was part of a plantation economy, it is just that its plantations were thousands of miles away. Some of the plantations were owned by people living in Connecticut.  Slave owning was common and well-accepted by Newtown society. Town historian Daniel Cruson has identified 43 families in Newtown who owned slaves. Many of the prominent families owned slaves, including the Glovers, the Botsfords, the Booths, the Platts, the Nichols, the Curtisses, and the Hawleys. There was little abolitionist sentiment in town. The two major churches in town, the Anglican Trinity Church and the Puritan Congregational Church, supported slavery in their theology. Some of their ministers were slave owners.” 
https://www.whyisnewtownsowhite.info/slavery-in-newtown.html

Examine the history on the slave trade on Wall Street, NY in the 1700s.

j. bell
j. bell
Reply to  Wallace Garneau
1 year ago

When you say, the wealth didn’t benefit all the colonial people, think of the settlement of the colonies as containing all classes/categories of people. From the poor seeking a better life, to those who brought wealth, titles, connections from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. And wealth usually flows downward to the masses, either directly or indirectly. For example because of their wealth at the top, the owners of Amazon.com, McDonalds, etc can hire more and give more opportunities. If some of  the owners of the Dutch West India Company and those like minded, settled in the colonies and continued to slave trade, that wealth flowed downward to benefit many directly or indirectly.   The rum that Connecticut/Barbados plantations sent to Africa, to purchase more slaves, was a triangle trade to buy more ‘free labor’, to process more sugar cane, agriculture products, etc. So White colonial wealth was produced at the expense of not having to pay for White menial laborers. But it was the Blacks who helped produce the colonial capital Wealth enjoyed by the Whites, but not in a thematic way. The Black labor was the ‘machine’, before machines were created.  
 
“A major type of rural community was the manor (in New York and New Jersey). The English rulers awarded government allotted enclaves to wealthy colonists to counter balance the patroonships granted by the Dutch……the first generation of New Jersey settlers from Barbados included John Berry with 32 slaves near Hackensack, in Bergen County, Lewis Morris who operated a forge and mill in Monmouth County employing over sixty slaves, and William Sandford and Nathan Kingsland who purchased a fifteen thousand acre tract near New Barbados in Bergen County….Frederick Philipse the first lord of Philipsborough Manor, graduated from a stint as a carpenter for the Dutch West India company in 1653, to plantation owner in Yonkers in 1672 and supplemented his earnings by slave trading…..in such rural new York towns there was as Viviene J Kruger noted a positive correlation between landed wealth and slave ownership in each rank of society. Prosperous farmers with more slaves owned more land generally while even modest property owners gained an advantage from slave labor.” —from the book “Root and Branch’, by Graham Hodges, pages 43-46, the slaves toiled at the mills, the bakery, the cooperage in addition to agricultural chores.   

ron helgesen
ron helgesen
1 year ago

wow partisan enough the constitutions emoluments clause in the constitution you claim to love so much? your party of FREEDOM on the right is a perfect example of your misinformation as you practice CONTORL. And women what THEY think about your controlling their personal choices. Look to who you put in power of my country, a narcissist who think only of the profit HE can make off the office, breaking the constitution you claim to love so much

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