You didn’t even discuss what you mean by wealth. I think most people (including most people reading this) have no idea what wealth means in this context or any other. Some folks seem to think that wealth is a stack of $100 bills. Others think it’s a vault full of gold dubloons. Or maybe it’s a nice house, or an expensive car.
Real wealth is not just those things. Real wealth is the total available goods and services that most people can access. Real wealth is being able to walk into any American grocery store and carry out food. Real wealth is being able to pick up the phone and call someone to come fill up your heating oil tank. Real wealth is being able to freely trade your labor without asking anyone’s permission. We can increase the options and availability of goods and services through the narrow gateway of supporting property rights and human freedom. We constrain it when we usurp property rights and diminish human freedom.
If you had to define wealth, I’m guessing your nebulous claims about the link between slavery of any period will not make much sense when talking about wealth we’re creating today. Pre-abolition cotton production was about 2 billion pounds per year and it took 1 million slaves to grow and harvest. Today we produce an order of magnitude more and it takes less than 1/10th the workforce.
We have vastly more cotton available to everyone for vastly lower prices. The capital created by slaves and stolen by plantation owners is dwarfed by the wealth created today, and for the past 100 years. If we were still living off of those ill-gotten gains, we’d be in trouble.
Farmers today are wealthier beyond the dreams of any pre-abolition plantation owner. At the same time, cotton is so cheap, it’s almost unbelievable. That is real wealth — when a product becomes so cheap that it’s ubiquitous nature makes people take it for granted. Today Americans might get a free t-shirt for attending an event. Free! And we are almost put out at the idea of having to lug it around. That is wealth!
That should tell you that our wealth does not rest on slavery, but on efficient production. How do we foster efficient production? How do we make more goods available at lower prices to more people? If you inspect these questions, you come to see that wealth and poverty are not zero-sum in that wealth takes from some to the benefit of others. It is zero-sum in the sense that poverty is the opposite of wealth. We are wealthy in cotton — not from taking it, but from making it. The same goes for practically every good and service we enjoy. They’re here not because they were stolen, but because we have fostered their production. There are some glaring exceptions, but they are exceptions. We should be cautious consumers when it comes to certain goods like chocolate, diamonds, gold and cobalt. But those are rare, not commonplace examples.
We can choose to look at how actual real world wealth can be increased, or we can choose to try to destroy wealth because it’s not divided according to our subjective preference.
One of these choices will increase overall prosperity. The other will decrease it, and the real victims of decreasing wealth are not the idle rich who have the leisure time to write finger wagging blog articles: they’re the folks at the margins.
