Four hundred years ago, ships set sail from the west coast of Africa and in the process, began one of mankind's most inhumane practices: human bondage and slavery. For two centuries, human beings – full of hopes and fears, dreams and concerns, ambition and anguish – were transported onto ships like chattel, and the lives of many forever changed. The reverberations from this horrific series of acts – a transatlantic slave trade that touched the shores of a colony that came to be known as America, and later a democratic republic known as the United States of America – are unknown and worthy of exploration. Approximately 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865.
Sheila Jackson LeeRelated topics
ambition begin bondage came chattel democratic exploration forever four full human hundred known later lives sail series set slave trade unknown west worthy Acts years StatesRelated quotes
The 'new theory of money and the cycle' which is spoken of in the opening paragraph is of course Hayek's. It was from Hayek that I began - where I got to will be seen. Even at the end, I was minimising my differences from Hayek. I could do so because, as I have elsewhere explained (Economic Perspectives, p. 141n), I still thought, like Pigou and Robertson, and Hayek, but by that time unlike Keynes, that 'we were talking about fluctuations, which, since they did not result in complete collapse or complete explosion, could not have engendered an expectation of going on forever. Booms could then be considered as times of high prices, slumps as times of low prices - with regard to some norm, which throughout the which throughout the fluctuations would not be changed, or not much changed'.
John Hicks
The Negro voter ... had, then, but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right. This was a perfectly fair and natural demand and ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation. To emancipate four million laborers whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries, was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Take the National Organization for Women - please! They've embarrassed me enough over the years, and now I'm going to give them a taste of their own medicine. They were always so holier-than-thou, systematically getting rid of everyone who wasn't just like them: white, upper-middle class, straight (or closeted), sex-phobic Democratic party apologists. As you can imagine, that's not a huge group anymore - but they still manage to hang onto a name that insists that they represent half the population!
Well, it's all over, sweethearts. I'm taking away your library card, I'm stripping badges and I'm not returning phone calls. Calling NOW feminists is like calling the People's Republic of China communist: Marx and Emma Goldman are both rolling in their graves.
Susie Bright
[N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious - and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or "victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn't judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on.
Jonah Goldberg
Traditionally, economic analysis treats the economic system as one of the givens. The term "design" in the title is meant to stress that the structure of the economic system is to be regarded as an unknown. An unknown in what problem? Typically that of finding a system that would be, in a sense to be specified, superior to the existing one. The idea of searching for a better system is at least as ancient as Plato's Republic, but it is only recently that tools have become available for a systematic, analytical approach to such search procedures. This new approach refuses to accept the institutional status quo of a particular time and place as the only legitimate object of interest and yet recognizes constraints that disqualify naive Utopias.
Leonid Hurwicz