View source for Not an argument: The free market would have ended slavery

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[[Category:RedHermit1982 (pseudonym)]]
[[Category:Stefan Molyneux]]
[[Category:The Truth About Slavery]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Historical Revisionism]]
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{{DES | des = [[Stefan Molyneux]]'s "[[The Truth About Slavery]]" is dismembered and ridiculed.  "Even if you’re the Second Coming of Ayn Rand, you can’t deny that the profit motive was core to the entire enterprise of slavery." | show=}}
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While it’s tempting to write Stefan Molyneux off as some fringe bozo on the margins of public discourse, he has a cult following roughly the size of the population of Alaska and his influence reaches beyond the confines of his little Youtube fiefdom. Freedomain Radio supplies the factoids that make up countless viral right-wing memes, such as this one, which is more or less a summary of Molyneux’s video “The Truth About Karl Marx.”
One of the more popular videos in that series, “The Truth About Slavery,” has been viewed some 880,000 times, and though it was released in 2014 many of its dubious “truths” are still making their way into the mainstream. In 2017, a series of viral slavery memes echoed the video’s core points—the Irish were slaves too, very few white Americans benefited from slavery and black people owned slaves.
His argument boils down to: Slavery was this bad thing that existed since time immemorial (but the Muslims were worse btw) and then white people put an end to it, so why do they catch beef?
This is one of the great misconceptions of history. So Western Europeans were very late to the party. The Muslim slave trade went on for 1,400 years. The Christian slave trade went on for a few hundred years. They were late to the party. They took very few of the slaves, as we shall see. They treated their slaves far better than what occurred in the Muslim countries, as we shall also see. So Europeans ended up fighting against slavery. Europeans ended slavery. So, of course, you only hear Europeans being blamed for slavery. This is horribly unjust.
But what really separates Molyneux’s video from your garden variety apologia is that he views slavery through the lens of ”anarcho”-capitalist ideology.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was not a result of market forces. It was developed under the power of the state… Slavery wasn’t economically efficient or driven by the free market
He even goes so far as to argue that were it not for the pernicious meddling of the state, the Hidden Hand of the market could very well have smashed the chains of slavery.
Colonial ’Crony capitalism’

Molyneux argues that the Atlantic slave trade was an evil born of a favorite libertarian boogeyman: “crony capitalism.” He asserts that slavery was not a “free market” because the slave trade was founded as a government monopoly. While it’s true that the slave trade in many countries started as a monopoly, this didn’t last long. The Royal African Company, which Molyneux mentions, only had a monopoly on the trade from 1660 to 1689, and during that time, it transported roughly 5 percent of the more than 2 million slaves shipped by the British Empire. After 1689, the trade was opened to other firms on condition that they paid a 10 percent levy to the RAC.
Molyneux never really explains how having more actors competing in a free trade of slaves would somehow be preferable to government monopolies, especially since this would—and did— increase the scale of the trade.
Some of the originators of laissez-faire ideology actually pointed to the slave trade in France as a free-market success story:
With yet another economic crisis on its hands, the French government took a desperate, unprecedented step. In defiance of mercantilist ideas, it deregulated the slave trade. For the first time, the monarchy allowed private firms to send slave ships to Africa and on to the Americas.
There would be no new state monopoly company to control the French slave trade. From a business perspective, the result was a wild success. Private traders sent increasing numbers of slaves to France’s colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). At the beginning of the 18th century, a few thousand slaves were brought to the French Caribbean each year. By the end of the 18th century, more than a 100,000 slaves were taken there annually.
This economic boom was a human tragedy. Slavery was brutal everywhere in the Americas, but slavery in France’s sugar plantations might have been the most brutal of all. Many enslaved Africans died before reaching the Caribbean colonies and, once they arrived, their average life expectancy was less than five years. They were simply worked to death. It was no accident that Saint-Domingue, the largest French colony, would be the scene of the most important and most violent slave revolt in the history of the Americas. 
The French deregulation of the slave trade was cited in a campaign against the monopoly of the French East India Company spearheaded by French economist Andre Morellet, the protégé of Vincent de Gournay, who coined the term laissez-faire.
Morellet insisted that state enterprises in general should be abolished, and cited the success of French slave traders after 1720 as proof of the superiority of laissez-faire over mercantilism. To those who felt that the deregulation of France’s trade with Asia was too risky, he answered: “This pretext is always relied on in the creation of monopoly Companies, and notably in the trade in Negroes on the African coast … However since then it has been observed that this competition, far from destroying commerce, sustained it. The French colonies in America had remained, until then [1720], in a state of great weakness; liberty revived them.” Liberty, of course, meant in this case the expansion of the slave trade. Colonial slavery was a force for economic freedom.
Interestingly, Morellet, in true libertarian fashion, also argued that naked self-interest was the great equalizer.
Indeed, the slave trade proved that Africans and Europeans were, at least in economic terms, exactly alike, hardly different after all: “the truth is that, on the subject of trade, people… act in the same way, because they are all guided by the same principle, that is to say, by interest.” Morellet reasoned that the slave trade proved Africans were equal to Europeans. Self-interest motivated both groups to sell or purchase enslaved people.
No permission for manumission

The next truth bomb that Stefan drops is that slavery would have probably just petered out on its own had the government not stepped in and “banned freedom.” He speculates that more slave-owners would have freed their slaves were it not for laws banning the practice, and that the presence of more freedmen in the labor markets would have driven the prices of slaves down to the point where it was somehow not economically profitable anymore.
There are so many holes in Molyneux’s fabled logic that I don’t know where to begin. For starters, the biggest factor in reducing the number of manumissions was the invention of the cotton gin in 1794. Before the arrival of the cotton gin, the number of manumissions annually was small but significant, but afterward it dropped to near zero. King Cotton was crowned and the demand for agricultural labor skyrocketed. Though most states in the South pass edlaws against manumission, it wasn’t until after the revolt of Nat Turner in 1831, and by then, manumission was already a rarity. Manumission as a phenomenon tended to be more affected by economic factors than any one law.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there were no laws against manumission. Does it really follow that a modest increase in the supply of free labor would have any discernable effect on the institution of slavery, much less the ability to peacefully end it? I’m actually amazed at how Molyneux manages to botch so badly the one economic concept libertarians usually have a tentative grasp on: supply and demand.
You can’t really apply normal market principles where slavery and free labor coexist. There’s no competition in the labor market between a free person and a slave because prices can’t get lower than zero. Furthermore—and it has been a long time since I took high school economics—but if I recall correctly, when you reduce the supply of something and the demand stays the same, the price goes up. If anything, the manumission of a few slaves would make the remaining slaves more valuable as commodities.
There’s a glaring gap in this whole narrative. According to Molyneux, the government is in cahoots with the elite class of slaveholding crony capitalists, on whose behalf they pass laws against manumission. But he’s expecting the very people who are lobbying so fiercely against manumission to free their slaves out of Christian kindness.
Slavery is like taxes

To cap off a video that conflates white indentured servitude with black chattel slavery and the plantation system of the Americas with the household slavery of Ottoman empire, Molyneux rides the false equivalence train all the way to the end of the line: taxes are a modern-day form of slavery.
When you force someone to hand over 100 percent of their earnings, that’s pure slavery. What percentage of your earnings are forced over at the hands of the state? We really haven’t fundamentally outgrown it as an institution. We’ve become free range serfs or slaves. We can choose our own occupations but we must still remit property taxes and income taxes and all forms of taxation to the state in order to secure our freedom.
Then he repeats his thesis that slavery isn’t real capitalism
And we’ve also thought that it has something to do with the free market so we think our enemies are racial and our enemy is the free market. Well it is not a racial institution and it was the complete opposite of the free market. It was a central, fascistically controlled pseudo market. It’s called “crapitalism”—crony capitalism—where you use the power of the state to benefit financial interests. That’s not a free market at all.
And then he reminds us that the real victim of American slavery was, of course, property rights
Forcing people to not do what they want with their own property. If slaves are property, you should be able to set them free, right? Banning people from setting their slaves free is not even treating slaves as property.
Finally, he hammers home his point by denying the racial character of American slavery one more time and once again listing taxpayers among the enslaved people of history.
Well the facilitation of slavery—the violent power of the state which made slavery possible and sustained its continuance—was imposed upon both whites and blacks and mulattoes and Chinese and Irish and you name it. It was imposed upon them against their will just as the national debt is imposed on your children against their will just as the bank bailouts are imposed on you against your will
I just want to end by saying it doesn’t matter how gung ho you are about capitalism. Even if you’re the Second Coming of Ayn Rand, you can’t deny that the profit motive was core to the entire enterprise of slavery. Slaves were used because the market couldn’t allocate enough labor to sustain the massive transcontinental enterprise that was colonialism. To the extent that free labor could be drawn to the New World, it posed logistical problems for colonial management because there was an ever-present threat of revolt by free laborers.
It was the pursuit of profit that drove the slave trade to reach such an unprecedented scale. Profit prompted slave traders to pack black men and women so tightly onto ships that they could barely move. Profit drove overseers to literally work slaves to death. And though Molyneux gives the British the lion’s share of the credit for “ending slavery,” the prosperity of the Southern slave economy depended heavily on demand from British industry—particularly the textile magnates of Liverpool. They even supplied the Confederacy and maintained trade ties with them throughout the Civil War in defiance of the Northern blockade.
I’ve done a lot of research into some of the other claims in this 40-minute parade of half-truths. And when I have time I’ll do another post. As much as I hate to spend any more time dissecting Molyneux’s videos or listening to his pseudointellectual blathering, there are actually some interesting and legitimate historical issues that are worth discussing, particularly the differences between slavery in the Muslim world and that of the Americas. So stay tuned.
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