New World Slaver Subsidies

 The meme: slavery prevents the industrial revolution due to lack of innovation or due to inefficient use of labour.

 The Reality: slavery prevents industrial investment because slavers keep slaves alive. 

 If you read my descriptions of slaves, it sounds like slaves are more trouble than they're worth. That's because they are; cue midwit meme. To use Communist terms, they're cost centres, not profit centres. The more slaves your society takes, the poorer it will become. E.g. the arab slave trade resulted in arabian zones falling into permanent third-world conditions. 

 If you have slaves, you don't have any money left over to invest. It doesn't matter how prone to innovation you are if you can't afford to buy the innovation. 

 Why did the north win the war of northern aggression? Largely because it was rich. Why was the south so poor? Propping up so many inherently unprofitable slaves. It is likely that the cotton fields only survived due to government subsidy. Same way modern voters are almost all net tax consumers. 

 Hey, let's check. "Money flowed from banks, many newly formed, on promises of “other-worldly” profits and overnight returns. Banks in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even London offered lines of credit to anyone looking to buy land in the Southwest." https://www.americanyawp.com/text/11-the-cotton-revolution/
 Hey look, logic works. You can buy a cotton farm, provided you're not spending your own money.

 "many planters simply leapfrogged from one area to the next, abandoning their fields every ten to fifteen years after the soil became exhausted." https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1os2xmaster/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/
 lel
 This "wildly profitable" "cash crop" couldn't even pay the maintenance on the land they used to grow it. 

 At the time, the cotton was exported, and this functionally paid for government tariffs. Demand for cotton exports is transmuted to supply of other imports, which were taxed. In other words a tax-farming scheme. Classic, if misnamed, [[regulatory capture]]. Effectively charge tariffs on cotton, then subsidize the growing of cotton to maximize tariffs.
 It seems this scheme was previously run on tobacco, which resulted in a permanent tobacco price crash (after many, many temporary depressions). It included a direct export tariff on tobacco, for example. Both tobacco and cotton were grown via agricultural looting, exhausting the fields and moving to the next.
 Tobacco clearly had its demand juiced by government command of religion. The correct solution was for the british to give up smoking. It's not even a real luxury, let alone a necessity. They did the opposite. Likewise one must suspect the textile industry was juiced, thus juicing cotton demand, thus enhancing tariff revenue. 

 Tobacco and cotton farmers could afford slaves because the government paid for them.

 

 Official ignorance ensures the [researchers] aren't looking for the slaves subsidies, so it's hard to find direct evidence. Perhaps the primary subsidy was the fact the government would return your escaped slaves for you. Likewise, you could sell a slave, using a government-secured trade channel. The workers couldn't quit without your permission, and if you wanted them to quit, you got paid for it. The security, even for natural slaves, is not affordable unless society at large pays for it on your behalf. American colonies thus maximized slave labour so as to leech from this pig trough as thoroughly as possible, and this cancerous parasitism resulted in repeated and severe depressions. 

 Internal slave trade worked exactly like a stock market. The net social benefit of trading stock, whether securities or slave, is zero. However, speculators can use the system to take money from dupes, especially fractional-reserve loans. They run away with the money, leaving some poor moron stuck between his worthless stock and the bank's counterfeit-money enforcement.

 Although I highlight security, slaves per se are worth less to society than the food and air they cost to maintain. With whips you can make them work, but this work is worth less than securing the whips &c. Without whips they won't produce, and it works out to be almost exactly the same drain on the wider society.
 Let them starve. Don't take prisoners in war, just kill them. If you're feeling merciful, execute them quickly instead of letting them starve slowly. 

 Almost all social problems come down to subsidizing the life of someone who should be dead. Feeding the non-working, or securing the criminal.