… is from page 390 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnotes deleted; original emphases):
People who seek to find blame, as distinct from causation, often also seek a localized source of evil to blame. Professor Paul Krugman, for example, refers to slavery as “America’s original sin.” But it would be hard to find an evil less localized than slavery. Though universally condemned today, slavery was an institution accepted as a fact of life for thousands of years, be even moral and religious leaders around the world. Christian monasteries in Europe and Buddhist monasteries in Asia had slaves.
DBx: Because these days one cannot be too careful to avoid misinterpretation, what Sowell is saying here – and what I, by quoting Sowell approvingly, am agreeing with – is that slavery, although without question an unmitigated and inexcusable evil, was not unique to America. The fact that slavery lasted for several millennia does nothing to excuse it, but this fact does imply that slavery was not original or unique to America.
