Change My Mind

And yet sterilization is equivalent to murder? You're just one cherry-picker of a historian, aren't you?

To avoid your crappy comparisons, I'll lay out my views on the subject of the meme above. The people whose ideas influenced the modern day west (people like Montesquieu, Adam Smith, etc) made many of their ideas in opposition to the institutions that have supported things like slavery and stuff like that. It also contributed more to the west when the industrial revolution was put into place more than slavery ever did. In fact, Jacob Viner actually conducted a study showing how it took more for England (the most prominent colonizer) to maintain India (the most prominent colony) than they ever got out from colonizing it.

So much so that as we all remember, they dismantled the entire economic foundations of Western civilizations down to the foundations so that they could rebuild it from scratch entirely slavery-free.

It evolved in such a way that slavery made very little contributions to the majority of the modern day west. The modern ideas of the west that came from the Enlightenment oppose the monarchies and colonization that many claim the modern west was founded on. Think about it this way. In the context of America, who contributed the most to the economy? The slaves or the machines that could do what the slaves were doing at a rate several hundred times faster and more efficient than people on plantation and ports?

You're talking about something that has been disproven. This was the idea behind Eli Whitney's cotton gin: he wanted a machine that would make slavery redundant in the cotton industry. In practice, it just expanded the volume of cotton required for the industry that needed to be grown to begin with, while at the same time, the machine itself was more cheaply operated if you could train someone you didn't have to pay to operate it. It didn't end slavery - it fueled it! It expanded it! As you know, slavery didn't end until sixty years later after a long and bloody war that entire regions of the country are still sore about to this day.

Your thesis is nonsense.

Bad comparison from you here. The cotton gin was part of series of machines that still require people working with it manually. It's not self-sufficient. Those types of machines were largely common before the Industrial Revolution.

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