My friend Michael Barnett made this observation recently:
I hate this argument that slavery would have ended naturally without the Civil War because slavery is economically unproductive. No, it’s not. It is very productive which is why it’s had to be outlawed one way or another in every place which has forbidden it.
Great point. He put into words something I’ve thought before too. The argument against slavery has to be a moral one.
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Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has spoken, lectured and published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023) (see below), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020).
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Lysander Spooner’s solution would have been much better than the Civil War. Much less loss of innocent lives.