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… is from Deirdre McCloskey’s new essay “Slavery Enriched White Slave Owners But Robbed America, Not Just African Americans”:

The “piled” plunder of the crime of slavery is dwarfed by the returns of the honest commerce that might have been; Jefferson’s declaration is an economic opportunity sadly missed. Free and equal Black Americans would have generated far more wealth in America than enslaved ones did. Economic history is unequivocal: Jefferson’s slavery wasn’t the basis of America’s prosperity; Jefferson’s liberalism, so beautifully expressed in the document we celebrate today, was.

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