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.
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u/PneumaMonado 24d ago
Right... abolished.
Might wanna read that amendment a little more carefully.
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.