Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
Honore de Balzac
I was reminded of this quotation by Balzac when I listened to
a recent (June 2) podcast of OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook on WBUR radio, Boston. The interview with historian and writer David Brion Davis of Yale University was on slavery. Davis establishes that slavery was the base of the New World economies, constituting something like 75 or 80% of the GDP during the early era of colonization until emancipation. Up until quite recently, historians have taught that slavery was good for the black man, and bad only for the whites, an economically unproductive and outmoded means of production. Some of his points from the book are made at an OUP book blog
here http://blog.oup.com/oupblog/2006/04/on_the_importan.html and I enjoyed reading about how he got into history at
this site
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/25840.htmlYou can get a little more of the flavor of the book from the NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14berlin.html (I think this requires a registration which tracks everything you read).
I was interested to see that he signed the letter, along with 450 other notable historians, expressing outrage and sadness at the wound inflicted on American democracy by the Supreme Court Coup d'Etat.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14082This brings me back to the quotation I opened this post with. What disturbs me is that the fortunes made off of those slaves are still funding generation after generation of a parasitic leisure class, while the descendents of those slaves are still struggling to get the levels of literacy, education, secure living places, employment, medical and psychological help, and other rights and privileges that they were so long denied. What kind of reparations could possibly atone for this huge injustice? The original perpetrators and victims are gone. What remains are the patterns of social injustice imprinted on our society like a bootprint on the face. All we can do now is to create a just, fair, equal society. There is no way to identify the descendents of victims and compensate them appropriately. That would also not be fair to the great-grandchildren of the slaveholders. What we can do is create a society that has equal opportunity for all. Free medical care for 2 weeks when you are born. Free medical care for life. Free education for all, regardless of ability to pay. A minimum wage which lifts people out of poverty, rather than pushing people down into poverty. Free daycare for all children.
Sadly, there are now members of the ruling elite who have become so greedy and arrogant that they are no longer willing to contribute anything to sustain the society that has enabled them to prosper and given them their wealth. These people wish to abolish the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax should be raised to at least 50%, with a generous exemption of 8 or 10 million to keep the small farmers from losing the effort they have invested for generations. This is a generous compromise with the propertied class. Those people who believe they are so superior that they deserve to keep the wealth their ancestors accumulated should have nothing to fear. If they are in fact brilliant businesspersons, they will quickly re-accumulate new wealth and thrive again (hopefully without reviving slavery). Actually, with their existing social networks and educational advantages, the old social order might regenerate itself even if resources and wealth were repeatedly redistributed. Still, these "socialist" ideas that I argue for are standard features of most liberal western democracies, such as Japan, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and Britain. A more egalitarian society is needed in the United States even more than it is in those countries, considering the historical baggage. It may take 3 generations, it may take 13, but America can heal itself.
