For an extreme case of the mudsill theory of social organization, look at Dubai. The entire native population does only white-color work. Everything else is done by imported foreign labor, who are effectively near-slaves.
Bravo. Decades ago a Constitutional Law professor who authored one of the definitive textbooks on the Civil War, noted the entire bloody conflict could be summarized with the phrase, "but who will pick the cotton?"
Now that flawed economic theory, that should have long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history, is meeting ever improving tech.
Last fall a new neighbor purchased a home and arrived with a Roomba type lawn mower that mows his entire 1/2 acre lawn, dotted with trees and bordered with numerous flower beds, perfectly. It never hits a tree or causes a plant to inadvertently drop a flower. It was an oddity, but has since been joined by a handful of others at nearby houses. All as the army of foreign gardeners that tend to large lawns, shrinks noticeably.
Homeowners are catching up to US grain farmers that have never utilized foreign labor. They do need them, having long ago modernized. With tech and ever larger machinery, they now farm exponentially more acreage with ever fewer bodies.
US produce growers refuse to join them, because it is cheaper for them to hire exploitable undocumented labor, pay them peanuts and allow taxpayers to make up the difference with ever growing welfare rolls, free healthcare and NGOs who disguise their taxpayer financing.
These people, treated as beast of burden adjacent, dwell in near abject poverty, unacceptable by any Western living standard, while their nations of origin lose any chance at development when their young and ambitious flee in large swaths to take low paying jobs, doomed to be replaced by tech sooner, rather than later.
Okay i see some serious plot holes with this comment. The misanthropic, Peter Thiel-esque sentiment that all our woes will be solved by tech bro innovation is for lack of a better word sophomoric and also dangerously reductive in my opinion. First of all, a new technology of the early 19 century, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, it could be well argued CAUSED the Civil War. Before that NEW technology, growing cotton was not a profitable business in terms of scale. Secondly, the US grain growers do benefit greatly from immigrant labor programs downstream. All (like 99%) of corn grown in our country can yes be harvested by mechanization but NONE can be eaten by humans. It’s feed corn to quickly fatten antibiotic-filled cattle for the beef industry. Most meat-packing companies rely substantially on immigrant labor.
Lastly, saying that a roomba lawn mower can maintain 1/2 acre yards is utterly ignorant on so many levels. Clearly the person who posted this is very far from ever having their hands in the dirt. Mowing the lawn is the easiest part of maintaining any plot of land. There is so much more that goes into any property management.
There are significant differences in harvesting something like grain versus fruits and vegetables. The whole grain field is cut and harvested at once. That can hardly be compared to picking ripe fruit off a plant and leaving unripe pieces to harvest a week from now.
The growth of credentialism and the suppression of job opportunities for teenagers have combined to greatly undermine Lincoln's vision that “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”
I'd like to suggest an addition to your theory. Money. Not all jobs can be replaced by smart machines, for those jobs, if they are lowly enough, and if not enough want to do them, employers will pay higher and higher wages until the position is filled. I know, I've done many of those jobs.
Half of ag workers are legal. What would their lives look like if wages increased high enough? It used to be that schools would allow teens to take days off, housewives would find someone to watch the kids, everyone would turn out for the huge daily paychecks to pick crops. How many workers would ag get at $500 a day?
Employers are just beginning to scream, and they have an attentive ear in Trump who has imported workers before. I'm waiting on wages which haven't budged in years. Doubling the cost of low wage labor wouldn't hurt much.
People who have never been an employer shed tears imagining their restaurant bill or cleaning ladies costing twice as much. In reality labor is only a portion of even the most labor intensive businesses. When I do the math the cost of a Big Mack hardly goes up.
Money. It's something everyone can understand, even those doing dirty dangerous jobs.
Exactly right. As I once heard it put: at the right hourly rate even Bill Gates will clean toilets. Anyone who says otherwise has not actually thought the proposition through.
This is a beautifully argued, rational, analysis of American history and how it applies today. Indeed, the arguments of the slaveholders are very popular once again. The great problem for those who wished to introduce a European style caste system in North America was always the fact that the relationship between land and population was reversed here. Europe had a shortage of land and a surplus of workers. Indentured servitude failed to solve the problem of too much land and not enough labor in America. Slavery solved that problem at the expense of the majority of citizens in the South. Jim crow continued to keep southerners poor and uneducated after the end of slavery.
Despite our long experience with the ill effects of the lust for a cheap labor force lacking in options, the self-interested continue to pretend that it is good and necessary.
This is a profound article and one the entire country needs to be reminded of. The ruling class and the Social Engineers benefit from a population that forgot its history and where we came from.
What minimum wage would it take to have all agricultural jobs (and others) performed by US citizens and legal immigrants? What would that do to food prices and other expenses? How much can the use of capital substitute for labor, if labor becomes much more expensive (say three times the current federal minimum wage)? Are we willing to pay more for food, childcare and other services?
Labor is always a divisive issue, depending on if one is labor or management.
Theories are just that - theories.
Actual historical facts taken in the proper context are what always I have found needed. These people had skin in the game. Theories are done by so called "intellectuals" usually who have no skin in the game. So, take it from there I believe?
I just read a biography on George Washington. Interesting person. Great leader so so military tactician. Of course, no one then really wanted his job! lol seemed like a real losing cause to most at the time. 2 or maybe 3 times in the book it is mentioned how frustrated he would get with the slaves. He always had to keep an eye on them and couldn't get any worthwhile work from them. Him and the other owners would complain to each other, but no one wanted to make the big (and the first ones would have bellied up and failed) jump to actually hire sharecropper type workers thinking they would get a lot better results. And they would have but the system was going and most know how that works. Goes on its own. So, besides slave labor being terrible it was also a terrible way to get things done. Most of these plantation owners from Washington on hardly made any money and were always behind on their debt and owed the factors in New York via London money and in debt to the extreme. Lousy system.
Another interesting fact. Read a few years ago about indentured servants or even Irish slaves coming over to work for their freedom (1600- mid 1700's). Now, the way I understood this, it really worked too well. The servants worked off their indentured servitude and them most went off to grow, usually at this time, tobacco. They had a trade and went to work to better themselves. HOWEVER, the other growers saw this and said, hey these guys are turning into stiff competition we are training! lol Also, England parliament got irritated at these freemen going into Indian territory (free available land they could get) to farm and the treaties with the Indians were being disobeyed which got the Indians agitated and going on the warpath. The English would have to send troops and money ect to placate the Indians. So, this didn't work out for these reasons, so they stopped and went full bore with other types of slaves to do the needed work.
So, real world slave labor is inferior and sucks. Indentured servants become stiff competition.
Serfs seemed to work well in Russia. The Davos crowd of elites say most will own nothing and be happy (sounds like serfdom). This is what communists have been saying. They never seemed very happy? The capitalists work hard for moats so to stay in business. Moats means monopoly. Sounds like communism to me. They will own and run everything too, like the communists?
Is there an answer somewhere in here? I don't know. But we are much better off materially on earth than we ever have been.
Last thoughts here, the race baiting talk is getting old and is not productive. Get some new better material please. It's tiresome.
Interesting article. I think it does conflate some important historical ideas however. Lincoln, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Free Soil party were against slavery for economic reasons first and foremost. Slavery caused DISTORTION to the marketplace. Labor or working class people could not compete with a slave wage. Now, the article did elude vaguely to sponsorship with temporary immigrant workers but this seems like a stretch to the “peculiar institution” alive in the pre-Civil War South.
The more important questions:
Has immigrant labor caused high unemployment for US citizens in the past 40 years?
Does an orderly immigration process (unlike what happened for the two years following Covid) hurt the fabric or delude the culture of the USA?
Does economic growth and dynamism improve by a closed door immigration policy which has been promoted by this administration?
Answer to all three- NO!!!
We are a nation of immigrants who have continually assimilated and strengthened our country on multiple levels! Immigration has been and probably will continue to be our biggest comparative advantage in the most Ricardian sense of that phrase.
Prime age male employment participation with only a high school degree was falling for years.
During covid many from Mexico went home, wages spiked. A closed border for a year sure did help.
and number three, male prime age nothing higher than high school labor participation over 2025 has finally turned around by almost a percent.
Answer to all three. Yes.
No founders of unicorns have come from Mexico, Central, or South America, they come from Europe, Asia, and South Asia. We don't need roofers, and we don't even need mediocre fake B1 visas, but we are open to all math olympiads and anyone else who will help America progress and innovate. People with a history of extremely low incidence of lawlessness and a history of studious hard work.
China is maybe not a great example of failure due to low immigration, they benefit from a centrally planned economy and millions of engineers. All with no immigration at all.
Appreciate your comment but we just disagree on a lot. Btw most of the workers recently are not from Mexico. Just bc ppl new immigrants don’t start unicorns doesn’t mean they aren’t making good contributions to our country. My ppl mostly came in 1905 and ran produce stands, fought in WWII and started small businesses. Don’t overlook salt of the earth folk who are motivated to improve themselves- that’s an energy that creates economic dynamism.
Brilliant! But how do we get the economic elites who champion mudsill theory booted to the policy wilderness? They seem as stuck to this theory as much as they are stuck in the institutions they infest.
And it should be noted that Lincoln was intent (and that intent succeeded, but it was largely by the hands of the general population, albeit under Lincoln’s leadership, who at that time had access to serious democratic governance structures) on the continuation a widely and deeply federated lower case "d" democratic system that diffused access to both the allocation of resources as well as decision making across all of the major policy spheres in a quite policy variable and legal/regulatory variable environment that heavily featured both economic and governmental redundancy...
Union soldiers use the term derisively, forming mudsill societies. General Slocum, who commanded half of Sherman‘s army in the March to the sea, said he would introduce mudsills to the Southern aristocracy.
Ahh caring for old and young, done out of love and obligation...blah blah. Done by women who are doing mudsill work through eternity. How is it capitalism appears to be not for women? And when women partake of capitalism at mudsill wages and demand something different?
That’s a mighty thin reed to build an entire article on.
How about a piece on deportation centers/internment camps, a topic actually relevant to what’s happening in the world as we speak? Perhaps explore the ties between their private operators and Don’s campaign, coupled with the squalid conditions?
Ah yes, the trope that only the rapists and murderers are being scooped up. I guess you could choose to believe Don this time, but after a while, doesn't the pattern come into view? $Trump coin anyone?
If not for the serial lies, performative cruelty, and repeated court setbacks, perhaps we could take these clowns more seriously. Instead, we're detaining our own veterans and engaging in made for tv spectacles like the sandwich man apprehension. Think of ICE agents that are so terrified by the mom they're pulling outta the school pickup line that they gotta wear masks, unlike real cops... It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
But hey, Tom Homan is back in charge now that Kristi has ridden her horse into the sunset. Since he's been caught on tape by the FBI accepting 50k in cash in a Cava bag in return for government contracts, he fits right in with the prison vendors...
At least someone other than Don and his billionaire tech bro buds is gettin rich, maybe it will trickle down to us?
For an extreme case of the mudsill theory of social organization, look at Dubai. The entire native population does only white-color work. Everything else is done by imported foreign labor, who are effectively near-slaves.
Bravo. Decades ago a Constitutional Law professor who authored one of the definitive textbooks on the Civil War, noted the entire bloody conflict could be summarized with the phrase, "but who will pick the cotton?"
Now that flawed economic theory, that should have long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history, is meeting ever improving tech.
Last fall a new neighbor purchased a home and arrived with a Roomba type lawn mower that mows his entire 1/2 acre lawn, dotted with trees and bordered with numerous flower beds, perfectly. It never hits a tree or causes a plant to inadvertently drop a flower. It was an oddity, but has since been joined by a handful of others at nearby houses. All as the army of foreign gardeners that tend to large lawns, shrinks noticeably.
Homeowners are catching up to US grain farmers that have never utilized foreign labor. They do need them, having long ago modernized. With tech and ever larger machinery, they now farm exponentially more acreage with ever fewer bodies.
US produce growers refuse to join them, because it is cheaper for them to hire exploitable undocumented labor, pay them peanuts and allow taxpayers to make up the difference with ever growing welfare rolls, free healthcare and NGOs who disguise their taxpayer financing.
These people, treated as beast of burden adjacent, dwell in near abject poverty, unacceptable by any Western living standard, while their nations of origin lose any chance at development when their young and ambitious flee in large swaths to take low paying jobs, doomed to be replaced by tech sooner, rather than later.
Okay i see some serious plot holes with this comment. The misanthropic, Peter Thiel-esque sentiment that all our woes will be solved by tech bro innovation is for lack of a better word sophomoric and also dangerously reductive in my opinion. First of all, a new technology of the early 19 century, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, it could be well argued CAUSED the Civil War. Before that NEW technology, growing cotton was not a profitable business in terms of scale. Secondly, the US grain growers do benefit greatly from immigrant labor programs downstream. All (like 99%) of corn grown in our country can yes be harvested by mechanization but NONE can be eaten by humans. It’s feed corn to quickly fatten antibiotic-filled cattle for the beef industry. Most meat-packing companies rely substantially on immigrant labor.
Lastly, saying that a roomba lawn mower can maintain 1/2 acre yards is utterly ignorant on so many levels. Clearly the person who posted this is very far from ever having their hands in the dirt. Mowing the lawn is the easiest part of maintaining any plot of land. There is so much more that goes into any property management.
There are significant differences in harvesting something like grain versus fruits and vegetables. The whole grain field is cut and harvested at once. That can hardly be compared to picking ripe fruit off a plant and leaving unripe pieces to harvest a week from now.
The growth of credentialism and the suppression of job opportunities for teenagers have combined to greatly undermine Lincoln's vision that “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”
I'd like to suggest an addition to your theory. Money. Not all jobs can be replaced by smart machines, for those jobs, if they are lowly enough, and if not enough want to do them, employers will pay higher and higher wages until the position is filled. I know, I've done many of those jobs.
Half of ag workers are legal. What would their lives look like if wages increased high enough? It used to be that schools would allow teens to take days off, housewives would find someone to watch the kids, everyone would turn out for the huge daily paychecks to pick crops. How many workers would ag get at $500 a day?
Employers are just beginning to scream, and they have an attentive ear in Trump who has imported workers before. I'm waiting on wages which haven't budged in years. Doubling the cost of low wage labor wouldn't hurt much.
People who have never been an employer shed tears imagining their restaurant bill or cleaning ladies costing twice as much. In reality labor is only a portion of even the most labor intensive businesses. When I do the math the cost of a Big Mack hardly goes up.
Money. It's something everyone can understand, even those doing dirty dangerous jobs.
Exactly right. As I once heard it put: at the right hourly rate even Bill Gates will clean toilets. Anyone who says otherwise has not actually thought the proposition through.
This is a beautifully argued, rational, analysis of American history and how it applies today. Indeed, the arguments of the slaveholders are very popular once again. The great problem for those who wished to introduce a European style caste system in North America was always the fact that the relationship between land and population was reversed here. Europe had a shortage of land and a surplus of workers. Indentured servitude failed to solve the problem of too much land and not enough labor in America. Slavery solved that problem at the expense of the majority of citizens in the South. Jim crow continued to keep southerners poor and uneducated after the end of slavery.
Despite our long experience with the ill effects of the lust for a cheap labor force lacking in options, the self-interested continue to pretend that it is good and necessary.
This is a profound article and one the entire country needs to be reminded of. The ruling class and the Social Engineers benefit from a population that forgot its history and where we came from.
What minimum wage would it take to have all agricultural jobs (and others) performed by US citizens and legal immigrants? What would that do to food prices and other expenses? How much can the use of capital substitute for labor, if labor becomes much more expensive (say three times the current federal minimum wage)? Are we willing to pay more for food, childcare and other services?
Labor is always a divisive issue, depending on if one is labor or management.
Theories are just that - theories.
Actual historical facts taken in the proper context are what always I have found needed. These people had skin in the game. Theories are done by so called "intellectuals" usually who have no skin in the game. So, take it from there I believe?
I just read a biography on George Washington. Interesting person. Great leader so so military tactician. Of course, no one then really wanted his job! lol seemed like a real losing cause to most at the time. 2 or maybe 3 times in the book it is mentioned how frustrated he would get with the slaves. He always had to keep an eye on them and couldn't get any worthwhile work from them. Him and the other owners would complain to each other, but no one wanted to make the big (and the first ones would have bellied up and failed) jump to actually hire sharecropper type workers thinking they would get a lot better results. And they would have but the system was going and most know how that works. Goes on its own. So, besides slave labor being terrible it was also a terrible way to get things done. Most of these plantation owners from Washington on hardly made any money and were always behind on their debt and owed the factors in New York via London money and in debt to the extreme. Lousy system.
Another interesting fact. Read a few years ago about indentured servants or even Irish slaves coming over to work for their freedom (1600- mid 1700's). Now, the way I understood this, it really worked too well. The servants worked off their indentured servitude and them most went off to grow, usually at this time, tobacco. They had a trade and went to work to better themselves. HOWEVER, the other growers saw this and said, hey these guys are turning into stiff competition we are training! lol Also, England parliament got irritated at these freemen going into Indian territory (free available land they could get) to farm and the treaties with the Indians were being disobeyed which got the Indians agitated and going on the warpath. The English would have to send troops and money ect to placate the Indians. So, this didn't work out for these reasons, so they stopped and went full bore with other types of slaves to do the needed work.
So, real world slave labor is inferior and sucks. Indentured servants become stiff competition.
Serfs seemed to work well in Russia. The Davos crowd of elites say most will own nothing and be happy (sounds like serfdom). This is what communists have been saying. They never seemed very happy? The capitalists work hard for moats so to stay in business. Moats means monopoly. Sounds like communism to me. They will own and run everything too, like the communists?
Is there an answer somewhere in here? I don't know. But we are much better off materially on earth than we ever have been.
Last thoughts here, the race baiting talk is getting old and is not productive. Get some new better material please. It's tiresome.
Interesting article. I think it does conflate some important historical ideas however. Lincoln, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Free Soil party were against slavery for economic reasons first and foremost. Slavery caused DISTORTION to the marketplace. Labor or working class people could not compete with a slave wage. Now, the article did elude vaguely to sponsorship with temporary immigrant workers but this seems like a stretch to the “peculiar institution” alive in the pre-Civil War South.
The more important questions:
Has immigrant labor caused high unemployment for US citizens in the past 40 years?
Does an orderly immigration process (unlike what happened for the two years following Covid) hurt the fabric or delude the culture of the USA?
Does economic growth and dynamism improve by a closed door immigration policy which has been promoted by this administration?
Answer to all three- NO!!!
We are a nation of immigrants who have continually assimilated and strengthened our country on multiple levels! Immigration has been and probably will continue to be our biggest comparative advantage in the most Ricardian sense of that phrase.
No one is trying to immigrate to Russia or China!
Actually Yes.
Prime age male employment participation with only a high school degree was falling for years.
During covid many from Mexico went home, wages spiked. A closed border for a year sure did help.
and number three, male prime age nothing higher than high school labor participation over 2025 has finally turned around by almost a percent.
Answer to all three. Yes.
No founders of unicorns have come from Mexico, Central, or South America, they come from Europe, Asia, and South Asia. We don't need roofers, and we don't even need mediocre fake B1 visas, but we are open to all math olympiads and anyone else who will help America progress and innovate. People with a history of extremely low incidence of lawlessness and a history of studious hard work.
China is maybe not a great example of failure due to low immigration, they benefit from a centrally planned economy and millions of engineers. All with no immigration at all.
Appreciate your comment but we just disagree on a lot. Btw most of the workers recently are not from Mexico. Just bc ppl new immigrants don’t start unicorns doesn’t mean they aren’t making good contributions to our country. My ppl mostly came in 1905 and ran produce stands, fought in WWII and started small businesses. Don’t overlook salt of the earth folk who are motivated to improve themselves- that’s an energy that creates economic dynamism.
Mudsill is a potential niche for grievance studies majors but don't let them drive semis.
Brilliant! But how do we get the economic elites who champion mudsill theory booted to the policy wilderness? They seem as stuck to this theory as much as they are stuck in the institutions they infest.
And it should be noted that Lincoln was intent (and that intent succeeded, but it was largely by the hands of the general population, albeit under Lincoln’s leadership, who at that time had access to serious democratic governance structures) on the continuation a widely and deeply federated lower case "d" democratic system that diffused access to both the allocation of resources as well as decision making across all of the major policy spheres in a quite policy variable and legal/regulatory variable environment that heavily featured both economic and governmental redundancy...
Which current nation next exemplifies the Lincoln solution? And what are they doing there to make it possible?
Union soldiers use the term derisively, forming mudsill societies. General Slocum, who commanded half of Sherman‘s army in the March to the sea, said he would introduce mudsills to the Southern aristocracy.
https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/12/mudsills-vs-chivalry/
Ahh caring for old and young, done out of love and obligation...blah blah. Done by women who are doing mudsill work through eternity. How is it capitalism appears to be not for women? And when women partake of capitalism at mudsill wages and demand something different?
That’s a mighty thin reed to build an entire article on.
How about a piece on deportation centers/internment camps, a topic actually relevant to what’s happening in the world as we speak? Perhaps explore the ties between their private operators and Don’s campaign, coupled with the squalid conditions?
Short article. Don't break the law and you won't be in your so-called internment camps.
Ah yes, the trope that only the rapists and murderers are being scooped up. I guess you could choose to believe Don this time, but after a while, doesn't the pattern come into view? $Trump coin anyone?
If not for the serial lies, performative cruelty, and repeated court setbacks, perhaps we could take these clowns more seriously. Instead, we're detaining our own veterans and engaging in made for tv spectacles like the sandwich man apprehension. Think of ICE agents that are so terrified by the mom they're pulling outta the school pickup line that they gotta wear masks, unlike real cops... It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.
But hey, Tom Homan is back in charge now that Kristi has ridden her horse into the sunset. Since he's been caught on tape by the FBI accepting 50k in cash in a Cava bag in return for government contracts, he fits right in with the prison vendors...
At least someone other than Don and his billionaire tech bro buds is gettin rich, maybe it will trickle down to us?