March 10, 2009

Could Obama’s carbon emission policies re-create the economic conditions that led to Southern secession?
by Bill Levinson

Who Pays for Cap and Trade? (Wall Street Journal, 3/9/09, A18) describes how Barack Obama’s proposed carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mandates will affect different regions of the United States. The table shows per capita carbon emissions in tons. Highest are Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, West Virginia, Montana, Louisiana, Indiana, Nebraska, Kentucky, and Iowa. All are either Red States or conservative Blue States. Lowest are NJ, FL, WA, OR, MA, CT, VT, CA, NY, and RI. All except Florida are reliable Blue States with high populations of latte-sipping liberals who would not touch a machine in a factory (or even set foot in a factory) if they can possibly avoid it. It comes as no surprise that these states probably support carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade, because it would effectively transfer wealth from the industrialized South and Midwest, and from coal-producing states like PA and WV, to New England and CA.

The forcible transfer of wealth from one region of our country to another has happened twice in the past, and each time it led to secession and civil war. Most likely today is the peaceful demotion of the fifty states’ “marriage” into a “civil union,” perhaps a North American Commonwealth similar to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is not something we advocate or desire, any more than we want cigarette smokers to get lung cancer. Cigarettes cause cancer despite our wishes to the contrary, and Obama’s reckless and irresponsible energy policies might easily wreck the United States despite our wishes to the contrary. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, so we have a responsibility to remind our readers of the interaction between the basic laws of economics and the driving forces of history.

Every human organization, whether it is a business, country, or social group, has a specific reason for existence. It has to be of mutual utility for all participants, and the Preamble to the Constitution is an excellent example.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If members of the organization believe, however, that they are being exploited for the benefit of other members of the organization, they no longer want to be part of it. In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the productive members of society effectively go “on strike” when the government expropriates the fruit of their labor to fund its social welfare system. The parables of the ants and the grasshopper, and the story of the Little Red Hen, carry a similar message.

If the government confiscates the Little Red Hen’s bread to feed the animals who contributed nothing to its production, she can always make less bread the next time (to avoid steeply progressive taxation rates) or, as some people are now putting it, “go John Galt” (i.e. work fewer hours to stay in lower tax brackets). When all the Little Red Hens who make the bread live in one part of the country while all the pigs who want to eat the bread live in another, though, unpleasant economic and geopolitical driving forces come into play.

We said, “The forcible transfer of wealth from one region of our country to another has happened twice in the past, and each time it led to secession and civil war.” The first case was the War of Independence, in which secession was successful. Why would citizens of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation want to secede from it? The reason was that Britain passed laws to enrich itself at the expense of its colonies, i.e. transfer wealth from one region of the country (America) to another (the Home Island). Colonists were forbidden to manufacture most goods; they were instead forced to exchange raw materials for manufactured goods, often at a very high markup. There is a story to the effect that George Washington joined the independence movement because he got shoddy manufactured goods in exchange for his plantation’s agricultural products. The bottom line is, however, that Britain exercised standard colonial policy–import raw materials, add value to them through manufacturing, and sell them back to the colonists for a huge profit–against its own citizens. Barack Buchanan now wants to enrich his Blue State friends at the expense of the country’s productive, and generally Red, regions: the same old garbage in a bright “green” package.

The failure of the United States to learn the right lessons from its own creation was to lead, “four score and seven years” later, to the most horrific waste of human life and treasure in the country’s history. The root cause of the Civil War was the industrialized North’s agitation for tariffs to keep out British manufactured goods, while the agrarian South’s economy relied on the exchange of cotton for those goods. In other words, the Federal government adopted policies whose purpose was to enrich the Northern states at the expense of the Southern states, just as Obama’s carbon agenda will enrich Blue States (except coal-producing states like PA, WV, and even IL) at the expense of Red and “Purple” states.

Contrary to popular belief, slavery was not the direct cause of the Civil War even though the issue was highly divisive.
(1) The Lincoln Administration had no plans to press for abolition, and would have been willing to let slavery stand to preserve the Union.
(2) The typical Southern enlisted soldier, who often marched barefoot because he could not afford new boots, obviously did not have enough money to own a slave. In peacetime, he probably resented the slave labor that often kept him out of paying work. He would therefore not have fought for the right of wealthy plantation owners to do so. He obviously fought for something else.

If you watch any movie about the Civil War (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) you will see a reenactment of thousands of men being mowed down by what were then the most destructive weapons on earth, with West Point graduates (as opposed to Iraqi bandits) in command on both sides. To put matters in perspective, the United States lost far more men in a single day at places like Gettysburg and Antietam than we have lost during the entire Iraq campaign. All of this took place because short-sighted and selfish people, mostly north of the Mason-Dixon Line, wanted to line their pockets at the expense of another part of the country. The same people were then able to hire substitutes to take their places in the Union Army so they would not have to risk life or limb in the conflict they helped start.

To this may be added the fact that the self-righteous abolitionists who called the slave-owning South “evil” could not bring themselves to make personal sacrifices to end slavery. This does not apply to Underground Railroaders who risked prosecution or even lynching to free individual slaves, but rather to the era’s counterparts of today’s latte-sipping wine-and-cheese-party liberals.

(1) The Federal government could have exercised its power of eminent domain to take the Southerners’ human “property” by paying for the slaves so taken. The cost would have been enormous, but far less than the cost of the Civil War. Many Abolitionists’ opposition to slavery obviously stopped where their wallets and bank accounts began.

(2) The abolitionists could have helped the South industrialize, thus ending the regional economic disparities while also making slavery uneconomical. The United Kingdom’s and the North’s abolition of slavery both coincided with massive industrialization; prior to this, Northerners owned slaves and played a major role in importing them from Africa. (Can anyone say “Yankee clipper ships?”) The truth is that the North did not want competition from Southern factories, and many Northern workers did not want Black people to compete with them for jobs. The attitude of many white Northerners toward Negroes (and Irish immigrants) was illustrated quite well in Gangs of New York.

(3) The abolitionists could have funded a crash program to invent a practical cotton harvesting machine (which was done during the first part of the 20th century), which also would have made slavery uneconomical. Enough Yankee ingenuity should probably have come up with something powered by horses or steam that one freed Negro laborer could operate for high wages while doing the work of a dozen slaves. This idea is relevant to cap-and-trade because the latte-sipping liberals in their ivory tower coffeehouses have yet to develop practical alternative energy sources to replace coal, oil, and natural gas. Had they majored in engineering as opposed to political science, social justice, community organizing, and labor relations, they might have something constructive to offer but, as matters stand, they can offer nothing.

Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama was dealt a lousy hand when he took office. The difference between Lincoln and Obama is shown by “Climb Your Way Up to the A-Team” in PE: The Magazine for Professional Engineers (March 2009). It cites Wayne Kurzen’s concepts of Ownership, Responsibility, and Accountability (OAR) versus Blame, Excuse, and Deny (BED). Lincoln took the OAR approach, while everything Obama does shouts Blame, Excuse, and Deny. Obama often talks about the mess he “inherited” from President Bush while he forgets conveniently the role his own party had in creating the mess. His frequent statement “above my pay grade” is the antithesis of Ownership, Responsibility, and Accountability. We therefore conclude that, while Obama may idolize Abraham Lincoln and invoke his memory, his real role model is James Buchanan.

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Addendum: the prospective secession of New England during the War of 1812 is yet another example of how regional economic disparities can break up a country.