America's Original Sin

It has been argued that America's original sin is slavery. Next to the sin of seizing and exploiting the wealth of an entire continent, the forced labor of African men, women, and children accounts for the unparalleled economic advantage the United States enjoyed over its competitors since the seventeenth century. It still does. For until people of color enjoy the same average wage, own the same average property, enjoy the same health care, the same education, and the same rates of incarceration as European Americans, that difference has no explanation other than the legacy of slavery in America.

Still, slavery does not account for the system that placed private labor and its exploitation at the center of the American economy. That would be capitalism, an economic system that pegs value to the marginal product of labor. The lower the cost of labor relative to output, the lower the costs of production, the greater the marginal efficiency. As Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel brilliantly demonstrated, southern slave labor was incontestably more efficient than northern wage labor (Fogel & Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1974). Moreover, whatever advantage the US economy today enjoys over its competitors it indirectly owes to the legacy of slavery, to the belief that individuals are responsible for their own private marginal product and are therefore responsible for their own health, education, and welfare. Those who believe themselves to be white also believe that they have earned the marginal advantage they enjoy over those whom they characterize as people of color.

It could be argued that the framers of the US Constitution had no choice. Without the support of southern delegates, there would have been no constitution. And without slavery there would not have been the support of southern delegates.

It is therefore of some importance that among the list of books these delegates consulted in framing their constitution two stand out. One was Aristotle's Politics, whose Greek title was πολιτεία, but whose Latin title was Res Publica. Since all delegates counted themselves "republicans," fierce supporters of "the wealth we hold in common" (thus, commonwealth), Aristotle's Politics was an understandable favorite. But, alongside Aristotle's Politics was another title, recently published (1776): Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. If Aristotle's Politics was republican, Smith's Wealth of Nations was anti-republican. Both books were on every delegate's bookshelf. Their fingerprints are visible in every congressional debate. Will the United States be a republic? Or will it be just another tyranny?

Tragically, the delegates chose the latter. Wealth in America would not be public. It would be private, including the wealth of the human beings an individual employs, free or slave. Yes. Slavery is America's original sin. But the root of that sin is capitalism, which measures wealth by the marginal product of labor.