If America Was Built On Slavery

... and we got rich, why didn't the Soviet Union get richer?

Following up on yesterday's drivel, today we'll look at the Secular Left's assertion that our wealth comes from the labors of slaves. Our sources will be The Gulag Archipelago and the biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

We all know the Antebellum South used slaves, primarily for agricultural work. To paraphrase president Lincoln, the slaves worked and the wealthy plantation owners reaped the rewards. Prior to the Civil War, General Forrest was a slave trader. According to his biography, in the late 1850s, a slave typically sold for $1,000 which translates into $30,000 today. By way of comparison, the cows shown below cost about $2,000 each.

The link for those cows is perishable, but here's the site where you can find cattle for sale.

That means you could buy 15 cows for the price of 1 slave. That's pretty expensive. Slaves were long-term investments and could be sold if you needed to raise cash to pay bills. Any punishment marks on a slave reduced his sale price because it marked him as difficult to manage. You could punish your slaves, but you did your best not to leave marks. That limited your options in forcing him to work harder. Killing them outright was financial insanity.

The socialist Soviet Union had slaves as well. Their endless streams of political prisoners fed their canal projects, gold mines and timber operations with plenty of slaves. Soviet slaves were free. All the State had to do to get another slave was arrest someone. As Solzhenitsyn notes multiple times in Gulag, labor camp sentences had nothing at all to do with guilt or innocence. Those words were meaningless in the socialist Soviet Union.

Aside: Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in the massive encirclements of 1941 were given 10-year sentences en masse when they were liberated. They were sent from the slave labor camps of Nazi Germany directly into the slave labor camps of the socialist Soviet Union.

Free slaves meant that the socialists in the Soviet Union could work their slaves to death without concern for their value. No punishments were forbidden to them for the same reason. Unlike the South, which could no longer import slaves, initially thanks to the efforts of evangelical Christians and the white sailors in the British Royal Navy, the Soviets could get more slaves any time they wanted. They didn't have to use the existing slaves as breeding stock.

Not having to breed new generations of slaves made the socialists' slave operations even more efficient. There were no expectant mothers that had to be given light work or no work. There were no nursing mothers and no infants and children to feed, returning no work. The socialists' slaves were all adults of working age. Every calorie of food spent on their upkeep was translated into free labor.

So if America owes its wealth to slavery, but Southern slaves were more expensive to buy and maintain and Southern slaves couldn't be treated as badly, why didn't the socialist Soviet Union flourish and become wildly successful? It had all the things the Secular Left tells us lead to prosperity. On the plus side, it was socialist, which we're told improves everything. On the minus side, it had plentiful and inexpensive slaves, which they say build mountains of profits for their owners. Instead, it collapsed, an utter failure.

Something from the Secular Left doesn't add up.