Capitalism and racism can't long peacefully coexist. Businessmen motivated by racial solidarity rather than profits won't stay in business. Read my Martin Luther King Day column @ Human Events on how the free market undermines racial discrimination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbFCVw2plbQ

I think we'll be waiting a long time for MLK's dream to come true because the way I see it, society is still judging people by the color of their skin and certainly not by the content of their character. That's what Affirmative Action is all about, no?

"Historical economist James Marketti estimates the dollar value of the labor taken from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 to be, depending on the historical assumptions, from $7 billion to as much as $40 billion. Such a figure roughly indicates what black individuals and families lost in income because they did not control their labor. Marketti suggests that, if that stolen income is multiplied by taking into account lost interest from then to the present, the current (1983) economic loss (income diverted) for black Americans ranges from $2.1 to $4.7 trillion. Updating these 1983 estimates to today would place the current value of the diverted income from black labor, plus interest, into many trillions of United States dollars."
-Joe R. Feagin, Harvard Law Review

My ancestors emigrated from the Alsace-Loraine region of France in the early 19th century, draft-dodging Pietist chicken farmers who sought to avoid the Napoleonic wars, so by no means were they worthy of any special consideration or respect when they arrived in the states. By all accounts they arrived here virtually penniless. But, they were French-Germans (at the time in the midwest many still spoke French and German due to the fur trade and other cultural ties) and had no problem assimilating. As laborers, they were poor, but they were able to fully reap the fruits of their labor. This would not have been the case had they been of African origin.

The extent of the knowledge right-wing bungling narcissistic assholes have of black economic history regarding the slave trade and colonialism is staggeringly shallow. Virtually the only fact they know about the good Dr. is that he said mankind should be judged by the content of their character. Of course, the good Dr. was steeped in theological and philosophical knowledge that goes far beyond that mere aphorism, and it shows in his speeches, but these facts are lost on the bungling, blighted rightists. The right-wing has no respect, toleration, or capacity to engage in rational discourse and is completely incapable of incorporating even the most basic facts into their working body of knowledge.

Most rightists, like Dan Flynn, are market worshipers (alternatively called "libertarians", anarcho-capitalists, market fundamentalists, and free-marketeers). They believe, with absolutely no empirical data and almost as flimsy rational justification, that private enterprise is always more efficient than public enterprise, and that individual wealth maximization yields the greatest level of societal benefits. The fact that all the historical data over the past 30 years demonstrates otherwise, the fact that Adam Smith would be rolling in his grave, is of no importance to them. The king is in his castle, God is on his throne in heaven, and everything is right in the world according to the market worshiping scumbag right.

And the heated rhetoric continues. Please tell me you don't own a gun.

What's the estimated dollar value of the labour taken away from enslaved Soviets under Stalin's five year plans or of those enslaved in the Gulag?

The proletariat sure got shafted by the inherent selfishness of a socialist command economy, didn't they?

Slavery is not a tenet of the free market economy although it is an example of it at its worst.

Slavery is not a tenet of socialism either, although it is an example of it at its worst.

Kick in your spurs and let your white elephant graze somewhere else.

PMA neglects to understand or maybe refuses to admit that all humans at some point have been slaves. At one time, even French/German chicken farmers.

Recent history is easy to correlate and assign blame for. But, we might as well go back through history and search for even more alleged injustices and assign reparations for all of those wronged.

And what about today? Slavery thrives in Africa (still) and most parts of the middle east and Asia.

On its face,your premise is ridiculous.

Although slavery in this country was certainly morally wrong, do you find many Americans of African descent who would voluntarily go back to the Mother Land? Freedom and sometimes a better way of life has its price.

I'm still trying to figure out why PMA assumes that capitalism necessarily leads to disenfranchisement (or in the case of the South, slavery).

Disenfranchisement is not a law (written or unwritten)that can be pinned on either capitalism or socialism.

Historically however, (and anyone who's read a history book that doesn't have the name "Zinn" in the byeline knows this)while capitalism has the possibility of disenfranchisement, socialism has inevitably led to it.

Russia under the Soviets, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, China?

All these regimes took socialism as their raison d'etre and all of them ended up disenfranchising (enslaving) their people.

I'd rather take the possibility of being disenfranchised under a capitalist system over the inevitability of being disenfranchised under a socialist system any day.

And yeah, it's a special irony that slavery is alive and well in Africa.