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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: combjelly who wrote (874877)7/24/2015 12:02:53 AM
From: i-node  Read Replies (2) of 1582274
 
Right. So how did cotton get picked between the end of the Civil War and the rise of the machine?

Sharecroppers. Sharecroppers were not as efficient as slaves. But poor whites got pulled into the system to help balance things out. And they were cheaper than keeping slaves.

What's really important is government was screwing up the process. Attrition could take its toll gradually as people were able to retrain and move on to other work, be absorbed slowly by the system.

What we've done today is to create a culture of unemployment that cannot hope to be absorbed by a system that isn't producing jobs due to government strangling economic growth.

When I was a kid everyone had Summer jobs picking where I lived. Some cotton, others tomatoes, other crops. No one worried about minimum wages or withholding taxes, any of it. White kids, black kids, it didn't matter, no one cared. It was pocket money.
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