In yesterday’s posting we described how we arrived at the
term “Economic Emancipation.” We had
been discussing whether the term “Capital Homesteading” was appropriate, and
started tossing possible new terms around.
The end result was that we decided to consider adding “Economic
Emancipation,” but without subtracting “Capital Homesteading.”
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| A Man Outstanding in His Field |
After more discussion, we thought that “Capital
Homesteading” should continue to be the way we describe the application of the
Just Third Way in the United States, while “Economic Emancipation” might be
good to use in other countries and at the Vatican. The fact is that linking our proposals to
Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act has too many benefits to discard lightly. We could go on for hours, but some of the
main advantages are:
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| Pillar of Democracy: Widespread Capital Ownership |
It dealt with the question of how to get ownership of the
vast federal holdings of land from the Louisiana Purchase into the hands of
ordinary people, rather than concentrate ownership in the hands of a few. True, some people were able to control huge
tracts by filing on water sources, but this was relatively rare. By and large, the Homestead Act benefitted
ordinary people much more than the rich.
There are hints that Lincoln intended to extend the
land-based homestead concept to commerce and industry. Unfortunately, he was murdered before
anything specific was done. In any
event, there are records strongly suggesting that Lincoln intended that the new
freedmen would take advantage of the Homestead Act, turning them from former
slaves into owners of capital. In
another unfortunate turn of events, Carpetbaggers anxious to use the new
political power of the freedmen against the disenfranchised former Confederate
soldiers not only diverted attention away from the homestead option, but gave
an impetus to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. (An example of what William Crosskey called
“Carpetbag Legislation” resulted in the Slaughterhouse
Cases of 1873, which nullified the Fourteenth Amendment and laid the
groundwork for the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.)
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| The McCormick Reaper |
It provided for quick settlement of the land, and the shift
from slave-cultivated cotton to wheat as the principal cash crop of the
U.S. Cotton was labor-intensive, and
David Christy used that fact in his 1855 book, Cotton is King, to justify the continuance of slavery. With McCormick’s invention of the combine
harvester, a few people could handle an entire wheat crop, a fact that became
significant after the Civil War and there was a need for products to replace
cotton. Further, you could rent a
harvester for a few days for what amounted to a pittance, while a good slave
field hand could cost upwards of $1,000, and had to be fed, clothed, and housed
year round. Cotton not only wore out
land at a tremendous rate, it cost a great deal of money to grow. The cost of growing wheat was never the issue
in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the cost was negligible; the
issue was the market price that dropped as production soared. It may be that one of the reasons for the
shift from grass-fed to grain-fed beef was farmers looking for new uses of
their product, just as today they are behind using feed grains to fuel
automobiles instead of putting money into other potential energy sources.
We’ll conclude with other advantages tomorrow to give you
time to think about these.