"Slavery Justified" its Socialism... (1849) George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881)

5fish

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George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era.

Link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzhugh

He thought slavery was good for whites or blacks...

Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating slavery that crossed racial boundaries. In 1860 Fitzhugh stated that "It is a libel on white men to say they are unfit for slavery" and suggested that if Yankees were caught young they could be trained, domesticated and civilized to make "faithful and valuable servants".[7] Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: "The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion", "Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves ... The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command", and "The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently

To him Slavery was:

"Slavery," he wrote, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."

"Socialism," he continued: Proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.
... Socialism is already slavery in all save the master ... Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.[18]


He strikes again:

'It is the duty of society to protect the weak;' but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, 'It is the duty of society to enslave the weak.'[28]

Snip... https://reason.com/1974/02/01/slavery-and-socialism/

Fitzhugh's philosophy had its feet in "respectable" ground: he took Christianity seriously, believed that men were their brother's keepers, decried selfishness, and thought family relationships were the ultimate sort of moral bonds.

Laissez-faire society, he wrote, attempted "to banish Christian virtue, that virtue which bids us to love our neighbor as ourself, and substitute the very equivocal virtues proceeding from mere selfishness."

Fitzhugh insisted that equal freedom to strive towards similar ends assured mutually hostile relationships: "There is no love between equals, and the divine precept, 'love thy neighbor', is thundered vainly in the ears of men straining for the same object."

"What is the difference between the authority of a parent and of a master?" Fitzhugh asked. "Neither pays wages, and each is entitled to the services of those subject to him.…Look closely into slavery, and you will see nothing so hideous in it; or if you do, you will find plenty of it at home in its most hideous form."

Snip... doctrine

"Man is born a member of society, and does not form society," Fitzhugh maintained. "He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society; and that society may very properly make any use of him that will redound to the public good."

"All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force," he wrote. "The very term, government, implies that it is carried on against the consent of the governed…"

Nowhere is such a feeling stronger than at Fitzhugh's account of the reasons for the "inevitable" demise of capitalism. Examples:

• All competition is but the effort to enslave others, without being encumbered by their support. [C, p.40]

• Indeed, [free laborers] have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die. [C, p.30]

• They [the poor] produce everything and enjoy nothing. [S, p.24]

• A beautiful system of ethics, this, that places all mankind in antagonistic positions, and puts all society at war. [S, p.24]

• We are not aware that anyone disputes the fact that crime and pauperism increased pari passu with liberty, equality, and free competition. [S, p. 36]

• Free laborers are little better than trespassers upon this earth.…[S, p. 249]

The article is long but a good read so read to get the rest of the story...

Link: https://reason.com/1974/02/01/slavery-and-socialism/


 

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George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era.

Link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzhugh

He thought slavery was good for whites or blacks...

Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating slavery that crossed racial boundaries. In 1860 Fitzhugh stated that "It is a libel on white men to say they are unfit for slavery" and suggested that if Yankees were caught young they could be trained, domesticated and civilized to make "faithful and valuable servants".[7] Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: "The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion", "Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves ... The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command", and "The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently

To him Slavery was:

"Slavery," he wrote, "is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."

"Socialism," he continued: Proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.
... Socialism is already slavery in all save the master ... Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.[18]


He strikes again:

'It is the duty of society to protect the weak;' but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, 'It is the duty of society to enslave the weak.'[28]

Snip... https://reason.com/1974/02/01/slavery-and-socialism/

Fitzhugh's philosophy had its feet in "respectable" ground: he took Christianity seriously, believed that men were their brother's keepers, decried selfishness, and thought family relationships were the ultimate sort of moral bonds.

Laissez-faire society, he wrote, attempted "to banish Christian virtue, that virtue which bids us to love our neighbor as ourself, and substitute the very equivocal virtues proceeding from mere selfishness."

Fitzhugh insisted that equal freedom to strive towards similar ends assured mutually hostile relationships: "There is no love between equals, and the divine precept, 'love thy neighbor', is thundered vainly in the ears of men straining for the same object."

"What is the difference between the authority of a parent and of a master?" Fitzhugh asked. "Neither pays wages, and each is entitled to the services of those subject to him.…Look closely into slavery, and you will see nothing so hideous in it; or if you do, you will find plenty of it at home in its most hideous form."

Snip... doctrine

"Man is born a member of society, and does not form society," Fitzhugh maintained. "He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society; and that society may very properly make any use of him that will redound to the public good."

"All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force," he wrote. "The very term, government, implies that it is carried on against the consent of the governed…"

Nowhere is such a feeling stronger than at Fitzhugh's account of the reasons for the "inevitable" demise of capitalism. Examples:

• All competition is but the effort to enslave others, without being encumbered by their support. [C, p.40]

• Indeed, [free laborers] have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die. [C, p.30]

• They [the poor] produce everything and enjoy nothing. [S, p.24]

• A beautiful system of ethics, this, that places all mankind in antagonistic positions, and puts all society at war. [S, p.24]

• We are not aware that anyone disputes the fact that crime and pauperism increased pari passu with liberty, equality, and free competition. [S, p. 36]

• Free laborers are little better than trespassers upon this earth.…[S, p. 249]

The article is long but a good read so read to get the rest of the story...

Link: https://reason.com/1974/02/01/slavery-and-socialism/
keep on digging :D
 

5fish

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It seems these to fans of capitalism agree with Fitzhugh...

Link:https://reason.com/1974/02/01/slavery-and-socialism/

Ayn Rand
, in her novel THE FOUNTAINHEAD, termed socialism "universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master."

Friedrich Hayek warned that socialism was reducing formerly free men to serfs.


Link: https://www.austriancenter.com/capitalism-did-not-cause-slavery/

Owen Jones claims in his Guardian column today that “capitalism was built on the bodies of millions from the very start” and that “the transatlantic slave trade became a pillar of emergent capitalism”.

Given that people are inclined to enslave others, whether or not they live in a capitalist economy, it is strange to attribute slavery to capitalism.

Or if you prefer economic to ideological explanations, consider 19th-century slavery in the US. This was practiced in the agrarian South, but not in the industrialized North. Part of the reason, at least, is that slavery is viable only when simple and easily monitored tasks are being performed, such as picking cotton or rowing in a galley ship. Because capitalism leads to innovation in production techniques and, with it, declining demand for unskilled labor, it would reduce demand for slaves even if the ideas behind it did not.

The impulse to enslave these days tends to arise only where collective goals are at stake


European countries still have military conscription, which temporarily enslaves young men for the purpose of national defense.

In a socialist economy, where the great variety of sometimes competing for individual goals are subordinated to collective goals, economic planners will be tempted to enslave those who do not voluntarily contribute to the plan.

The point is slavery is not capitalism while slavery is socialism bring people together into a collective to produce a product using coercion when needed...
 

Matt McKeon

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I disagree. American slavery was pretty much a capitalist enterprise. George Fitzhugh was a nut, and the antebellum South doesn't resemble Sweden.

Economists mumble about how the market provides the solutions. To have the industrial revolution kickstarted by slaves, people who were literal private property, makes people think we need some other values in the mix.
 

5fish

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conomists mumble about how the market provides the solutions.
I do not know the right-wing think tanks are determined that slavery had nothing to do with capitalism ... I think they are determined to prove that slavery had nothing to do with industrialization but use the word capitalism...

Link:https://mises.org/wire/how-slave-owners-pushed-marxist-wage-slavery-and-exploitation-theories

modern pundits are claiming modern American capitalism was built on a foundation of antebellum slavery.

The contention is obviously false for no other reason than the fact the industrial economy didn't skip a beat when slavery was abolished.

So overwhelming is the evidence against the idea that the southern economy built American capitalism,

Snip... it sounds like Fitzhugh

The slave powers opposed market economies overall and attempted to portray them as morally inferior to the slave system.

Indeed, the term "wage slavery" and its variants were popular among slavery's defenders, who sought to portray capitalism as a system more barbaric than the chattel-slavery system of the American slave states.

But, if the northern system of wage labor could be shown to be even worse, this would put the abolitionists in an uncomfortable position.

Common to this narrative was the contention that the wage workers of England and the northern US were worse off than slaves.

Joseph Dorfman notes how South Carolinian poet and essayist Louisa McCord denounced "de facto white slavery of England and the North" as a cause of starvation and deprivation not seen among slave populations.

Senator James Hammond "in a Senate speech in 1858 succinctly summarized the southern position in telling the North that its wage slaves were, like the black slaves, the mudsill of society and political government."2

the mudsill theory, there is bound to be some group that does the unpleasant work that supports the economic foundation of society, and "it makes no difference whether the workingmen are the wage slaves in the North or the Negro slaves in the South."3

John C. Calhoun, for example, contrasted the northern wage system with the slave system which sounds nearly utopian:
"Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative. These small communities aggregated make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally represented and perfectly harmonized."

Snip... Fitzhugh keeps on giving...

Fitzhugh gets right to the point in the first sentence of the first chapter:
"We are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade, and he who succeeds best is esteemed most respectable. It is far more cruel than the Black Slave Trade because it exacts more of its slaves, and neither protects nor governs them."

Fitzhugh thus confidently concludes "there is not one intelligent abolitionist at the North who does not believe that slavery to capital in free society is worse than Southern negro slavery."4

There is more than it turns into an anti-union article... Link:https://mises.org/wire/how-slave-owners-pushed-marxist-wage-slavery-and-exploitation-theories




 

Matt McKeon

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This whole libertarian "jury duty is like slavery" is in bad taste. It insults the people who had to endure slavery. Fitzhugh's whole spiel about wage slavery is nonsense as well. And the abuses of early industrialization aren't going to be addressed by enslaving more people, or keeping people enslaved. In fact as useful to slave owners as phrases like "wage slavery" were, I think we can understand its rhetoric to obscure, not reveal.

Modern economists don't want the triumphant story of the industrial revolution to be tainted with the fact that slave produced cotton was the kick starter. Which, in England and America, it was.
 

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I'm stopping to think that modern economists have an axe to grind, the axe and grindstone being made up of the old "slaves were a valuable resource, so they were well treated" spiced with slave owners were somehow not go getting business minded folks trying to get ahead.
 

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This link need to be read my excerpts give little it...

Link:https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/slavery-socialism

Free laborers are at constant war with their employers. They seek high wages—the employers struggle to depress wages—and also at war with each other, by underbidding to get employment. Hence, the free laborer is treated worse and fares worse than any other animal on an English farm; and hence the slave always fares and is treated far better than mere brute animals.deeply admired Aristotle’s defense of slavery, but “Nothing written on the subject of slavery from the time of Aristotle, is worth reading, until the days of the modern Socialists.”

Aristotle also states "he is of someone else when, while being human, he is a piece of property; and a piece of property is a tool for action separate from its owner." Based on this quote, Aristotle defines natural slavery in two phases. He concludes that those who are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body of man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them, it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned.

He(Fitzhugh) also meant individualistic socialists, such as Stephen Pearl Andrews and others who defended “sovereignty of the individual.”

Fitzhugh praised Andrews as “far the ablest writer on moral science that America has produced.” He continued: “Though an abolitionist, he has not a very bad opinion of slavery.”

A major reason for Fitzhugh’s admiration of Andrews becomes evident when we consider the latter’s approach to slavery. Although Andrews was a serious abolitionist, his definition of “slavery” did not depend on the distinction between voluntary and coerced labor. Rather, he regarded slavery as the extreme end of a scale of the exploitation of labor, so there existed lesser forms of slavery in free, commercial societies. Here is how Andrews put it, in a passage quoted by Fitzhugh:

He argued that slavery advocates need not adopt a defensive posture and defend slavery on moral grounds, since Northerners were as guilty of exploiting their laborers as were Southerners.

“Read the work of your able philosopher, Stephen Pearl Andrews, on “The Science of Society,” and you will see how slavery does exist in (so-called) free society.” I

Fitzhugh cast down the utilitarian gauntlet to Hogeboom:
I will agree and consent that slavery is wrong, and should be abolished, if you can prove that the “greater number of featherless bipeds” will be physically better off by its abolition. I think that nine-tenths of mankind are best off when they are ridden with a tight rein, and plentiful applications of the whip and spur. … Such [people], embracing nine-tenths, probably nineteen-twentieths of mankind, require masters as well to protect and to provide for them as to govern them.


A slave plantation was a nearly perfect socialist community, since slaves received food, shelter, and medical care from cradle to grave, regardless of their physical condition—advantages that Northern workers did not enjoy. . All these advantages were provided by the masters that did not exist in the North.

Free laborers are at constant war with their employers. They seek high wages—the employers struggle to depress wages—and also at war with each other, by underbidding to get employment. Hence, the free laborer is treated worse and fares worse than any other animal on an English farm; and hence the slave always fares and is treated far better than mere brute animals.deeply admired Aristotle’s defense of slavery, but “Nothing written on the subject of slavery from the time of Aristotle, is worth reading, until the days of the modern Socialists.”


Fitzhugh:
Slavery, besides associating men more closely as the socialists propose, also associates labor and capital, and thus renders them more productive. It also agrees with communism in supplying each one according to his wants, and not according to his labor. It is far superior either in this, that the head of the association owning its members is impelled alike by domestic affection and self-interest to take good and kindly care of them. Man takes the best care of that property which is most valuable. Slaves are not only the most valuable property, but they are weak and dependent human beings, and we can’t help loving what is frail and dependent.

Free laborers are at constant war with their employers. They seek high wages—the employers struggle to depress wages—and also at war with each other, by underbidding to get employment. Hence, the free laborer is treated worse and fares worse than any other animal on an English farm; and hence the slave always fares and is treated far better than mere brute animals.


All socialists, indeed I might say, all men agree that the common laboring class and all the weaker members of society require more of protection than is now afforded them. But, to protect men, we must have the power of controlling them. We must first enslave them before we can protect them.


 

5fish

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You know I have tried to find a another socialist thinker that supports slavery... I can not find a one... Fitzhugh is one of a kind...
 

O' Be Joyful

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You know I have tried to find a another socialist thinker that supports slavery... I can not find a one... Fitzhugh is one of a kind...

Whoa, Marx ünd Hegel did not support the suppression of the working class's inherent and ingrained intentions ?

p.s., i know better, I have read both.
 

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George Fitzhugh - Wikipedia


Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating a slavery that crossed racial boundaries. In 1860 Fitzhugh stated that "It is a libel on white men to say they are unfit for slavery" and suggested that if Yankees were caught young they could be trained, domesticated and civilized to make "faithful and valuable servants".[7] Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: "The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion", "Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves ... The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command", and "The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently fallacious."[8]

7 George Fitzhugh. Horace Greeley and his Lost Book, Southern Literary MessengerVolume 31, Issue 3, 1860.
8 Brown here quotes from the work of the southern proslavery writer George Fitzhugh, though it is clear that Brown is taking these quotations from published accounts of Fitzhugh's work that appeared in the antislavery press." — Brown, William Wells (2011). My Southern Home: The South and Its People: The South and Its People, Chap. XV, University of North Carolina Press (footnote).​
 

Matt McKeon

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You know I have tried to find a another socialist thinker that supports slavery... I can not find a one... Fitzhugh is one of a kind...
To be honest, he doesn't seem to be very socialist.
 

5fish

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I think I found Fitzhugh southern opposite a lady named Louisa McCord ... I general they both supported slavery but she was about free markets... she was a bright lady of her day...

Here is the link it is an article: the south was the bulwark against progressive ideas from Europe... https://jacobinmag.com/2015/08/first-red-scare-civil-war-european-socialists-bornstein-republicanism

One of the most fiercely anti-socialist Southern thinkers in the years before the war was South Carolina’s Louisa McCord. McCord came from the upper echelon of Southern plantation society. Her father, Langdon Cheves, had served as president of the Bank of the United States, and, in her adult life, she and her husband David James McCord owned land and numerous slaves.

During the 1840s, McCord became enamored with the work of the conservative French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat. McCord’s reading of Bastiat led her to denounce the supposed dangers of socialism. She railed against Proudhon’s famous declaration that “Property is theft,” fearful that it would encourage what she called the “ignorant masses” to indulge in “license” and “anarchy.”

She agreed with Bastiat’s contention that reducing the length of the working day would check production and result in shortages and famines. She worried that passing laws to improve wages would rob workers of ambition.

“That the state,”
McCord wrote, “should be able to give everything to everybody, yet require nothing from anybody is certainly an unfathomable enigma.”

McCord most feared that socialism and what she called the “hydra of communism” would infect American society. Though the failure of the 1848 revolutions had halted radical reform in Europe, she was well aware that they had prompted thousands of progressive thinkers to cross the ocean.

She also knew that European revolutionaries would find plenty of like-minded thinkers among America’s native-born labor reformers. McCord claimed to detect “at every turn” the “insidious effect” of what she called “the extravagant madness” embodied in the “dream of fraternity and socialism.” For proof, she pointed to the presence in American society of abolitionists, free-soilers, and “agrarian” land reformers.

For McCord and many other white Southerners, the preservation of slavery offered the best hope for arresting progressive politics and solving the problems of modern society. The Southern intellectual George Fitzhugh was among the most prominent thinkers to argue that a society founded on racial slavery would prove superior to one founded upon the “wage slavery” of industrial capitalism. Fitzhugh infamously asserted that slavery was more humane than free labor because supposedly paternalistic slave owners provided their workers with food, housing, and medical care.
 

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I found nothing that truly showed her intellect and her support of slavery...

Louisa Susannah Cheves McCord - Wikipedia

McCord, Louisa Susanna Cheves - South Carolina Encyclopedia

LOUISA S. McCORD (1810 – 1879)

As a thinker, Louisa S. McCord was conservative and classical. She wrote against abolitionists, feminists, and socialists. In her writings about political economy, she was a proponent of principles known as laissez-faire. According to historian Robert Duncan Bass, her translation of Frederick Bastiat’s book in 1848 “influenced all her subsequent political thinking.” Bastiat was a champion of the free market and wrote brilliant and devastating critiques of protectionism and government subsidies. He also emphasized the importance of private property and argued that the rights of all in society are best served when property rights are respected.


McCord published the essays in which she synthesized contemporary thought on the defense of slavery, women’s subordination, and political economy. She believed that African Americans constituted a natural working class and that slavery acted as a means of maintaining social order. White women, while intellectually equal to white men, were forced to subordinate themselves within a social hierarchy due to their physical inferiority to white men, whom she believed possessed both the intellect and the physical prowess required to maintain a peaceful society. She warned that abolitionists and the emerging woman’s rights movement exposed the nation to unrestrained violence from the working classes, specifically to the threat of slave rebellion

She also wrote on political economy, in support of free markets, and translated the French economist Frederic Bastiat’s Sophisme Economique. Published under the initials “LSM,” her essays appeared in important southern journals such as De Bow’s Review and Southern Quarterly Review, and they were well received and praised by her male contemporaries and were reflective of the dominant opinions of South Carolina’s elite classes in the decades preceding the Civil War.

. She declared in a letter to William Porcher Miles this same year, “An effortless life, is, to a restless mind, a weary fate to be doomed to.” She would keep on writing, “as no other door is open to me.”

Here a article just about her life...

https://columbiametro.com/article/the-illustrious-mrs-mccord/
 

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It seems to be a huge stretch and mostly an application of some of the results of specific socialist applications and making it with fit.

At it's core Socialism and Capitalism are just competing economic systems. Individual vs Group ownership, with the text book definition usually being socialism = society/group/labor ownership of the means of production while capitalism = individual ownership of the means of production.

This is where I agree with @Matt McKeon that American slavery was capitalist. You can't really argue group ownership (especially for the labor owning it as socialism usually emphasizes) when the labor itself is property owned by an individual.

Essentially American (and similar forms of) slavery was capitalism nearly at it's purest form. Gone were the aristocratic capitalist illusions where the labor weren't much removed from being property themselves being tenant farmers, yeomen, vassals, etc. It was a full embrace of treating people literally as property rather than pretending they didn't (while in many ways effectively doing so).

There is nothing socialist about owning a bunch of things, if it ties back to an individual owning that (or group of individuals as it often turns out to be, but again based on a system of individual ownership) then it's capitalism plain and simple.

Now slaves owned by Universities, the Jesuits, or things like that might be argued as starting to bleed over into socialism. Though socialism beyond it's simplest text book for of group ownership leads to group labor ownership. It's all about the workers having an equal share in owning things not business owners or elites (which doesn't really fit in academics or religious organizations either).

He effectively proves the point here:
"Socialism is already slavery in all save the master"

Without the master you don't have anything like American chattel slavery, which was all about that "master" aka individual owner.

Unfortunately the arguments made in the source material are similar to what I see these days. Unfortunately you could hear all sorts of opinions from many people these days about capitalism or socialism, though if you stop them and ask them to give a basic text book definition of what they are they will be completely lost. You can't argue with integrity on something you can't define in the first place.

In this case Fitzhugh is just stretching things, forcing a point.

"In a socialist economy, where the great variety of sometimes competing for individual goals are subordinated to collective goals, economic planners will be tempted to enslave those who do not voluntarily contribute to the plan."

Yes... of course the same thing can be said about any form of Democracy, where the minority opinion on an issue are forced to contribute to the plan of the winning side. In no place is this more obviously clear in American history than when the Confederacy first introduced it's draft (whether you supported the war or not) and the United States followed. Many people were literally forced to give their life for the plan they may not have supported, the "collective goals" that they were a minority interest in. Obviously there are less extreme examples as well.

The reality is whether you are implementing a Capitalist or Socialist economic system you have to pair it with various forms of political and governing systems. Often those can end up quite similar in the end and have to deal with the same sorts of problems (and same resulting compromises).
 

O' Be Joyful

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In this case Fitzhugh is just stretching things, forcing a point.

"In a socialist economy, where the great variety of sometimes competing for individual goals are subordinated to collective goals, economic planners will be tempted to enslave those who do not voluntarily contribute to the plan."
"Atlas Shrugged" ;) and yes, I read all 10oo plus pages, as well as "The Fountain Head."

Who is John Galt?
 

Matt McKeon

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Altas Shrugged, Fountain Head, Jacqueline Susann for sociopaths.

Pro-slavery ideologues like John C. Calhoun took property rights to their extreme. Enslaved people were property to be 'carried' anywhere their owner saw fit. The owners' property rights trumping federal, state, local authority, as well as humanity.
 
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