Should government policies be decided by referendum?

[MadImmortalMan]

A 20% winning margin is hardly split right down the middle.  Obviously the overwhelming majority of non-Southern politicians knew it had support in their states.  The South is like...11 or 13 States out of 50?

How many states were there in 1865? 

[Valmy]

How many states were there in 1865? 

We are talking about 1964 here

But there were 36

[CountDeMoney]

Slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, but the south resented it for generations and continued to treat blacks very, very badly.

Slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment.   But because the South resented it, it shouldn't have been passed?  Go fucking die.

Yeah it is odd that he picked an example which is quite at odds with his notion.

Lawyers.  Just gotta qualify everything. Even the stupid shit.

[viper37]

In contrast, in the South the wealthy slave-owning class somehow convinced the much more numerous poor Lettowists to fight for slavery (oh, "states' rights") even though it in no way benefited them personally.

actually, they thought it was benefiting them.

Free blacks = cheap labour.  Cheap labour = lesser wages for the white men.  This is what many were afraid of.  And they probably weren't that wrong either.

[viper37]

I demand proof that the majority of the people in the US were against the Civil Rights laws, the voting rights thing, and the slavery amendments after, and during, the Civil War.  The latter maybe...but I doubt it especially by 1866 when the states were voting on the amendments.

A national referendum on those things would have returned a positive result.

On slavery, once the war had started, I figure a near totality of northerners were against it.
Had you asked them in 1857-1858, they might have had the majority, but maybe not as much as post-war.

But it probably wouldn't matter, since any change like that would be voted on a State by State basis, not a truly popular vote accross all the country, no?

[viper37]

Kinda tough to get re-elected without a majority of the vote.

depends if there are more than 2 candidates.

[Malthus]

In contrast, in the South the wealthy slave-owning class somehow convinced the much more numerous poor Lettowists to fight for slavery (oh, "states' rights") even though it in no way benefited them personally.

actually, they thought it was benefiting them.

Free blacks = cheap labour.  Cheap labour = lesser wages for the white men.  This is what many were afraid of.  And they probably weren't that wrong either.

Uh, the reason wealthy whites liked slavery is that slaves as workers are cheaper than paying wages at all. 

How can a free whilte worker compete in ecomomic terms with a slave?

[dps]

My point is that while the Congress may have overwhelmingly voted for it, that doesn't mean that they had overwhelming support by their states. All they had to have was enough support to get re-elected. That doesn't necessarily equate to a majority of the nation being pro-CRA. As I said, the race riots across the country kind of indicate that it wasn't a unanimous situation.

First of all, yes it does.  Congresspeople are cowards, there may have been a few principled souls but not between 84 and 98 percent of them.  And if you are correct then in the 1964 election there should have been tons of anti-CRA candidates trying to throw them out of office.  As far as the race riots go, well nobody is claiming it was unanimous.

As far as race riots go, it generally wasn't people opposed to the Civil Rights Act that were rioting.

In general, as far as referundums go, I'm opposed to them in a representative democracy.  Whether not certain groups within a society are denied voting rights isn't really relevant here because the people being denied the right to elect their representatives would also be denied the right to vote on a referundum.

That said, I'm not totally opposed to the use of a referundum to decide certain basic questions, such as amending a constitution or adopting a new constitution entirely.  A lot of US states undermine that idea, though, by having constitutions that instead of laying out basic principle are so overdetailed that it almost takes an amendment to hire or fire a janitor at the statehouse.

[merithyn]

Uh, the reason wealthy whites liked slavery is that slaves as workers are cheaper than paying wages at all. 

How can a free whilte worker compete in ecomomic terms with a slave?

No room, board, guards, or social pressure necessary.

[dps]

Uh, the reason wealthy whites liked slavery is that slaves as workers are cheaper than paying wages at all. 

How can a free whilte worker compete in ecomomic terms with a slave?

No room, board, guards, or social pressure necessary.

A lot of plantation owners (the ones that unfortunately missed getting killed or having their places burned to the ground) found out after the war that it was cheaper to run a plantation with wage labor than with slave labor.

Of course, not all labor in the pre-war south was done by slaves.  If you were a free man and a wage earner, if you were employed in a trade in which slaves weren't much used, you didn't want them freed and flooding the labor market.  Plus, you could aspire to get ahead and someday being able to own a plantation and slaves of your own.

OTOH, the real reason that poor free whites in the south supported slavery wasn't economics;  it was status.  No matter how poor or downtrodden you were, if you were a free white man, you had a far, far greater social status than even the most well-treated and priviliged slave.

[merithyn]

OTOH, the real reason that poor free whites in the south supported slavery wasn't economics;  it was status.  No matter how poor or downtrodden you were, if you were a free white man, you had a far, far greater social status than even the most well-treated and priviliged slave.

An awful lot of white trash still feel that way. "I may be poor, toothless, addicted to drugs, and beat my wife, but at least I'm not black."

[The Minsky Moment]

I don't like them for the same reasons others have already mentioned.
Also in the current American context they are ideal vehicles for moneyed special interests to try to buy legislation they want - the Michigan bridge initiative this last cycle was a good example of that tendency.

[dps]

I don't like them for the same reasons others have already mentioned.
Also in the current American context they are ideal vehicles for moneyed special interests to try to buy legislation they want - the Michigan bridge initiative this last cycle was a good example of that tendency.

Probably not all that good of an example in that it lost.

[Barrister]

I don't like them for the same reasons others have already mentioned.
Also in the current American context they are ideal vehicles for moneyed special interests to try to buy legislation they want - the Michigan bridge initiative this last cycle was a good example of that tendency.

Probably not all that good of an example in that it lost.

It was close though for something so transparent.

[Malthus]

Uh, the reason wealthy whites liked slavery is that slaves as workers are cheaper than paying wages at all. 

How can a free whilte worker compete in ecomomic terms with a slave?

No room, board, guards, or social pressure necessary.

Slaves are still cheaper. Historically, plantations did not rely on employing guards, but on externalizing that cost - contracting out to slave-catchers. Plantations employed "drivers" essentially to keep an eye (and whip) on the slaves to ensure that they worked, but what kept them imprisioned was the sheer hopelessness of resistance - and certainty of being caught if they ran (in spite of that, some did run, making it all the way to Canada).

Room and board generally was provided by the slaves, who were expected, in their copious spare time, to make their own shacks and grow their own food.

In fact, one of the complaints about how harsh slavery conditions were in the new cotton plantations of the deep south was:

Slaves were driven much harder than when they had been in growing tobacco or wheat back east. Slaves had less time and opportunity to improve the quality of their lives by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could in the east.

The result was not that the owners were put to the expense of feeding them, but that the owners worked them to an early death through malnutrition:

The death rate was so high that, in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some planters preferred whenever possible to use rented slaves rather than their own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#High_demand_and_smuggling

If slavery did not "pay", people would not have used it.