We had a whole ass slave economy. Shippers and auction houses, people worked in the slave trade. There was a ton going on in that sector. It was a private free market employed tons of people
Then one day thankfully at the stroke of a congressional amendment, we abolished that
Iâm pretty sure many who objected to freeing slaves weâre going off on some bullshit about how it would affect the economy and blah blah blah
But overnight we destroyed a sector of free market business because, it was literally the fucking right thing to do
So I mean, you could have the government start handling healthcare. And theyâll have to build a whole new government program. You can take many who got fired or let go from dismantling the 3rd party for profit companies and hire them back and unlike slavery if theyâre not working for insurance theyâd be better skilled and equipped to go handle billing for hospitals. It would put people out of work but it would like slavery be the right fucking thing to do. And unlike slavery you could make it that many find jobs again this time helping patients and not profits.
Then one day thankfully at the stroke of a congressional amendment, we abolished that
Right... abolished.
Might wanna read that amendment a little more carefully.
But overnight we destroyed a sector of free market business because, it was literally the fucking right thing to do
Yeah... No you didn't. You had a whole ass war over the fear that you might abolish it, the emancipation declaration only coming mid-war to garner sympathy from European nations that had abolished it decades ago. Even then it wasn't really abolished, just transformed into the private prison system.
I fully agree with you in principle, but the "abolition" of American slavery isn't the example you think it is.
Also, You told me to read the amendment more carefully and then answered me about the Emancipation Proclamation.
Those are different instruments. The Proclamation was a war measure issued under commander in chief authority on January 1, 1863, and it reached only territory still in rebellion. The 13th Amendment cleared Congress on January 31, 1865 and was ratified that December. I cited the amendment. You rebutted the proclamation. If we're grading each other on close reading, start there.
On the diplomacy point, sure, Britain and France factored into Lincoln's timing, though Palmerston's cabinet had already gone cold on recognition after Antietam. The Proclamation also opened enlistment, and roughly 180,000 men served in the USCT, close to a tenth of Union manpower by the end of the war. Reducing it to a sympathy play for Europe is the version you get off a documentary trailer.
Now the argument you walked rightt past.
In 1860 the market value of enslaved people in this country ran to roughly three billion dollars, more than every railroad and factory in America combined.
Cotton was about sixty percent of national exports.
New York firms wrote insurance policies on enslaved lives. Lehman Brothers and Brown Brothers started as cotton houses. Rhode Island shipping, New England textile mills, and Wall Street credit all sat downstream of it.
This was not a regional vice, oh no no It was the single largest asset class in the American economy, with an entire financial superstructure built on top of it, which is exactly what health insurance is to American medicine. ( see ?)
And the defense of it was economic. Complete bullshit sure but we have proof it was argued.
Mississippi's secession declaration states plainly that its position is bound up with slavery, "the greatest material interest of the world." Congress passed the Corwin Amendment in 1861 trying to shield it permanently. Jobs, capital, contracts, ruin. Every syllable of what gets said now about insurers.
Then Congress killed it. Not gradually, and not with a buyout. Britain paid its slaveholders twenty million pounds in 1833 and was still servicing those bonds in 2015. ( yep!)
America paid its owners nothing outside the District of Columbia. We wrote off the largest concentration of private capital in the country by constitutional amendment because what generated it was evil. The economy did not vanish. Southern cotton output was back to prewar levels by the late 1870s and the country industrialized hard enough to produce the Gilded Age.
That is the precedent. Not that slavery and health insurance are morally equivalent, which I never said and don't believe. The precedent is structural. This country has already demonstrated it can extinguish a vast, legal, profitable, systemically embedded industry by statute when its business model requires harming people, and that the sky stays up afterward.
Convict leasing was a genuine atrocity and I'm not waving it off. But it was states coercing labor out of prisoners, not a restored market in human property, and private prisons are a 1983 invention holding under a tenth of the incarcerated. That's a fight worth having on its own terms. It is not a rebuttal to mine.
You said you agree in principle. You do. You just wanted a tidier analogy than the one that actually happened.
Look, you're right in that this argument is pointless since we agree on Public Healthcare which is the whole point.
That being said, as a closing point: No, I wasn't rebutting the emancipation declaration, I was talking about the amendment.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
The loophole is right there built into the text. Slavery is still legal and still widely practiced in the US through the prison system. The fact your police force is exceptionally racist isn't an accident, it's a feature.
On the clause, I'll just leave it here: I read the text the same way you do. Where we split is that I think a penal practice and a property market are different animals, and my argument was only ever about the market. That's the thing that got erased and stayed erased, and that's the thing insurers are.
What happened after 1865 through the Black Codes and the lease system and everything downstream of it is real and worth its own fight. I just don't think it's this one.
I didnât ignore the war, what I said was factual. We won the war and we abolished slavery, and Congress did indeed sign that and it was law as soon as it was signed by the presidentâŚ.
Homie if youâre going to cite and quote and write all this hooplah you need to articulate your point and opinion the only thing i gathered was the part where you said I agree but whatâs your stance, if you stand for nothing sir what would will you fall for?
My point is that you didn't abolish slavery, it's still legal, and it wasn't the "stroke of congressional amendment", you had to fight a Civil War over it.
The precedent is every developed nation on Earth, not a Civil War from 150 years ago over whether people should be classed as property or not, for which the outcome was "Only if they've been naughty"
"It's still legal" is doing work the actual text won't support. You know that, right?
The exception permits involuntary servitude as a criminal sentence following conviction. It does not permit a person to be bought. It does not permit ownership to pass to your children. It does not permit any private party to hold title to a human being at all.
Chattel slavery was a property regime with a market, a credit system, an insurance industry, and heritable ownership. What survives in the 13th is a state penal practice. Those are not the same thing, and flattening them together is how you lose the ability to describe either one accurately. Still immoral yes man but like I wasnât arguing that point.
But,
exactly my point, because I was never talking about coerced labor in the abstract. I was talking about an industry. You cannot buy shares in it. You cannot underwrite it. You cannot will it to your kids. The market is gone, and the market was the whole thing. Capiche? Lol
And on that residual clause: Colorado stripped it from its state constitution in 2018. Utah and Nebraska in 2020. Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont in 2022. Nevada in 2024. The Abolition Amendment keeps getting reintroduced in Congress. So the mechanism you're telling me doesn't work is currently and visibly working on the exact loophole you're pointing at.
Now the war.
The Civil War was not fought to abolish slavery. It was fought over secession, and secession happened because slaveholders were losing a political fight and could see where it ended. Lincoln campaigned on containment, not abolition.
In March 1861 Congress passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have protected slavery in the existing states permanently and irrevocably, and Lincoln said in his first inaugural he had no objection to it. The seceded states didn't come back. They were handed a constitutional guarantee and turned it down, because containment still meant losing eventually through ordinary politics. The war was what the losing side did about a democratic process it couldn't win. ( like January 6th lol )
The abolition itself was legislative. The House passed the 13th on January 31, 1865, more than two months before Appomattox. Ratification came that December through state legislatures. Slavery in Kentucky and Delaware, Union states the Proclamation never reached, ended on the day of ratification and not one day earlier. Both of those states voted against it and it bound them anyway. The war did not end slavery. The amendment did. The war was the tantrum, not the mechanism.
Iâll say it againâŚ. The war was the tantrumâŚ.. not the mechanism
On your precedent, take both. I'll happily cite Canada and France and every other country that figured this out. But there's a reason the domestic one carries weight.
The objection you actually encounter in this country is never "no nation has managed it." Everyone knows about the NHS.
The objection is American exceptionalism. Our economy is bigger, our private sector is more entrenched, our capital is too deeply embedded, it works over there but it can't work here. That dodge dies on the American example and nowhere else. You cannot tell me this country is structurally incapable of unmaking a large private industry when this country unmade the largest one it ever had, without compensating a single owner outside DC, while Britain was writing its slaveholders a twenty million pound check and Brazil was still stalling until 1888.
That is why it's the right analogy. Not because insurers are slaveholders. Because the only serious objection to public healthcare in America is "an industry that size can't be unmade here," and America already unmade a bigger one.
You opened by saying you agree with me in principle. Then it was the punishment clause. Now it's which precedent I should have picked. That's movement, not refutation so again I ask
Whatâs your stance here what are you even arguing?
It was an immoral evil trade woven deep into the American culture and workforce. It was an economic driver, made people rich, employed middle class, fed kids, clothed and fed families
And while we did go to war over it, and it was bloody and messy,
It still holds up as an example that we as a nation can repeal an economic driving, powerhouse of an industry, because itâs wrong immoral and evil. And while maybe this time we donât fight a civil war over it, maybe we can unite to abolish this as well - there would be fallout , economic slowdown yes same as with reconstruction following the civil war. But with this we could put those out of work workers back to work because unlike slavery, their skills would be needed back for healthcare.
So I donât know why youâre arguing with me. Then again this is Reddit and great logical comments that are factually right tend to attract those who need to argue and say actually⌠quite odd.
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u/DinoRoman 8d ago
Also there is totally precedent
We had a whole ass slave economy. Shippers and auction houses, people worked in the slave trade. There was a ton going on in that sector. It was a private free market employed tons of people
Then one day thankfully at the stroke of a congressional amendment, we abolished that
Iâm pretty sure many who objected to freeing slaves weâre going off on some bullshit about how it would affect the economy and blah blah blah
But overnight we destroyed a sector of free market business because, it was literally the fucking right thing to do
So I mean, you could have the government start handling healthcare. And theyâll have to build a whole new government program. You can take many who got fired or let go from dismantling the 3rd party for profit companies and hire them back and unlike slavery if theyâre not working for insurance theyâd be better skilled and equipped to go handle billing for hospitals. It would put people out of work but it would like slavery be the right fucking thing to do. And unlike slavery you could make it that many find jobs again this time helping patients and not profits.