At 2:34 PM -0800 2/18/98, Robin Hanson wrote:
...
>Peter McCluskey responded:
...
>> I think Jeff Hummel makes a convincing argument in Emancipating Slaves,
>>Enslaving Free Men that slavery was unsustainable because of the
>>increasing difficulty of recapturing runaway slaves. It sure looks
>>like technological changes such as railroads had a significant role
>>to play in that.
>
>I haven't read Hummel, but if slavery was just becoming economically
>unsustainable, wouldn't the prices of slaves have fallen to zero?
Jeff's argument is that the enforcement costs were being heavily subsidized
by the states, largely in the form of drafted "patrollers."
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr@best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
Received on Thu Feb 19 03:03:12 1998
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Mar 07 2006 - 14:45:30 PST