Welcome Back! Let's Recap, Shall We?

Welcome back, ladies!  I hope everyone had a fabulous winter break and I know you're all excited to get back to learning...not.

how we all feel about going back to school

When we last saw each other, we spent a delightful class eating candy and cookies and watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", which we discovered is a perfect metaphor for the conflict between Mr. Yarnall and our class, exhibited by the pictures below.

     

But unfortunately, not every class can be spent eating candy canes and playing Christmas pictionary with movies and songs the Napolis have never heard of.  During our last real class, we discussed the origin of Atlantic slave trade and Adam Smith.  In this post, I will briefly cover the last few topics from the chapter, since Giulia did such a thorough job covering a lot of material in her last post.

Atlantic slave trade originated after the Native Americans were dying out from the diseases that the colonists and explorers brought with them to the New World.  These diseases, which included smallpox and measles, destroyed many Caribbean populations.  In addition, many of the Native Americans were unwilling to work for the Europeans who came to the Americas, so they had to find another source of labor.  They turned to Africa for cheap labor, taking people there to the New World to work as slaves.  The "shore method" of trading involved Europeans obtaining slaves at various locations along the coast by inviting Africans to their ships where they could then move quickly and easily along the coast and to the Americas.  Slavery already existed in Africa, but it became a racial issue in America, where the slaves were predominately black.  Eventually, the importation of slaves was outlawed, but by that time there were already so many slaves in America that natural reproduction continued this horrible practice as more and more people were born into slavery.

At this time, when the powerful European countries had most of the land in the New World and the authority in international trade, independent merchants in other countries wanted to get rid of the imposed monopolies and have free trade instead, without regulations and specific laws. 

Adam Smith was the author of Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  He was considered the godfather to classical liberalism, which is similar to today's Republican policies/ideals.  He advocated for small government, non-interventionism, isolationism, and free enterprise.  Smith also created the "invisible hand" metaphor in economics, which stressed that the markets were self-regulating.  The government and the people did not need to interfere with it because the economy and the markets would work themselves out and remain balanced naturally.  He argued that the government should limit itself to only 3 duties:

• The government should provide a defense against foreign invasion.
• The government should maintain civil order with courts and police protection.
• The government should sponsor certain indispensable public works and institutions that could never earn an adequate profit for private investors.

Smith's work became a classic argument for economic liberalism and capitalism.

Alright, that's all for now ladies (and Mr. Yarnall)!

me after I finished this blog post at 3:18 am