Profiting from slavery

Slave shrimp

Profit is made from X when total revenues from production and sale of X exceed total costs.

Nothing else is profit from X.

Thus only people in the trade, themselves, can profit from slavery, those who produce slaves as well as those who buy slaves in bulk for distribution and resale.

Before the whites put a stop to it, that would have been black Africans who captured untold millions of other black Africans for enslavement, for example, and the Arabs and other Muslim traders they sold to, and the Muslim, European, and American shippers they sold to, and the wholesalers they supplied in African and Middle Eastern lands, in India, and in the Americas, as well as retailers if any in those same areas.

Persons employing slaves in their enterprises do not profit from slavery or even the labor of the slaves they own, nor by any other factor of production, but certainly may diminish their costs by use of slaves as they might by use of any form of cheaper labor, or any cheaper factors of production.

And that, I think, covers it.

Do people or enterprises buying products made by slaves, or produced using components or materials or other factors of production made by slaves, or themselves using components or materials or other factors of production made by slaves, or etc. . . . profit from slavery?

Well, no, though they may indeed realize savings and it may even happen that they can only afford such products and cannot afford alternatives made only by free labor, produced using only components, materials, and other factors of production made only by free labor, themselves using only components, materials, and other factors of production made only by free labor, and etc. . . .  - even free labor more viciously sweated and worse compensated than the slaves.

If I recall correctly, there was a time in ante bellum America when it was pretty much impossible for ordinary folks to buy clothing, for example, not incorporating materials made by slaves, or etc. . . . and perhaps many other products as well.

Leaving out the really, really poor who wore only used clothing or found castoffs, of whom there were many.

The post as KOS to which I link threatens moral condemnation of white consumers buying shrimp from farms recently discovered by The Guardian to be using shrimp feed made from fish caught by boats using slave labor, and thus also indirectly future moral demands that their white descendants pay reparations to the Asian descendants of those slave fishermen to the billionth generation.

Hence these questions that might as well have been raised by recent demands of privileged black writers in America and their well-off white allies that another black skin privilege be created here, that of receiving reparations for slavery though they were never slaves, from white people who never owned slaves or lived in a society that legally allowed slavery, almost none of whose ancestors were in the trade and many of whose ancestors were not even Americans at the time.

These whites, of course, are very, very far from profiting from slavery, and it is equally far from evident that they or their non-American ancestors ever faced lower costs because of slavery.

As to those ancestors who were American at the time of slavery and may (it is uncertain) have faced lower costs on account of it, it is far from evident either that the cost difference was significant or that they had any actual alternative.

Anyway, as to the moral issues the proper and final response is that morality is coercive bunk by no means always in a laudable cause, as are the political demands purportedly resting on it.

And in this case both the moral condemnation and the demands resting on it are particularly revolting.

Given that those on whose behalf demands are made do not include descendants of non-slaves whose exploitation was equally awful or even worse this is transparently racist special pleasing.

Given that those upon whom demands are made include only white and leave out black descendants of those who actually did profit while including (again) only white descendants of multitudes who did not, this again is transparently racist special pleading.

In sum, the whole business stems from and powerfully encourages the racial hatred of American blacks for American whites.

That, along with the looting, is of course the point.

Anyway, to return to the matter at hand, people buying these shrimp don't profit from slavery though they may face lesser costs on its account.

As to that, just how important that cost difference is, by the time the shrimp get to the super market, is hard to say, though I must point out that despite the KOS writer shrimp at the local store are very far from cheap.

Should you avoid buying such shrimp on account of the involvement of slaves?

Should you stop buying anything at all because of such involvement, assuming you have the least idea of it?

Well, that's up to you, but your individual choice will have no noticeable effect - far more shrimp are simply lost along the way in a few days than you will ever buy in all your life.

Come to that, should you stop buying goods from Asia or wherever labor is, by comparison with America and Europe, much, much cheaper or cruelly exploited?

No more consumer electronics for you, eh?

And where will you buy your clothes?

And, again, you as a single consumer are as invisible and utterly insignificant as you as a voter.

And what can these questions about what you should do mean, anyway, if they are not meaningless moral questions laden with menace?

You may do as you wish, of course, but morality swept aside, why would something so completely out of your hands as the ultimate sources on the far side of the world of what you buy in any case concern you?

Just a thought.

Here is a little something about right and might.

The wolf does not always get to eat the lamb. 

But he tries. 

Jean de La Fontaine, The Wolf and the Lamb

Translation by Eli Siegel    

A lamb was quenching its thirst
In the water of a pure stream.
A fasting wolf came by, looking for something;
He was attracted by hunger to this place.
—What makes you so bold as to meddle with my drinking?
Said this animal, very angry.
You will be punished for your boldness.
—Sir, answered the lamb, let Your Majesty
Not put himself into a rage;
But rather, let him consider
That I am taking a drink of water
In the stream
More than twenty steps below him;
And that, consequently, in no way,
Am I troubling his supply.
—You do trouble it, answered the cruel beast.
And I know you said bad things of me last year.
—How could I do that when I wasn't born,
Answered the lamb; I am still at my mother's breast.
—If it wasn't you, then it was your brother.
—I haven't a brother.—It was then someone close to you;
For you have no sympathy for me,
You, your shepherds and your dogs.
I have been told of this.I have to make things even.
Saying this, into the woods
The wolf carries the lamb, and then eats him
Without any other why or wherefore.