The ‘Northern War of Aggression’ Against the South Rages On With Biden’s Policies
By Carole Hornsby Haynes November 5, 2020 Education Views
Since the founding of our nation, the South has been exploited economically by Northern liberals. That pattern continues with Joe Biden’s economic policies that are a “de facto war against the high-growth red states of the South and the Sunbelt.”
Economist and author, Stephen Moore, writes that Biden wants to impose the same failed policies on the South that have crippled the blue states, especially New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Biden would rather crush highly productive states in the name of “equality” than make blue states more productive through sound economic policies of cutting taxes.
In fact, Biden’s policies benefit the North while they crush the red states of the South and Sunbelt.
If Biden wins, he plans to abolish right-to-work laws which exist in 26 states – mostly in the South. Moore notes that over the past 20 years these labor laws have created “twice as many jobs as the blue states as auto and steel factories, light manufacturing, and even tech firms have left the Northeast and Midwest and come to Dixie to avoid the unions.” If these labor laws are abolished, the South will see a resurgence of unions with the New South becoming the New Rust Belt.
If anyone wonders about the effects of unions on our nation, consider public education. American education once was the best in the world. In 1979 the United States Department of Education was created under President Jimmy Carter as payback for the support of teachers’ unions. Under government and union control, academic excellence has steadily spiraled downward while the costs of government education have ballooned out of control. Today American workers are the worst educated in the industrial world, placing the American economy in peril.
Biden wants a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The South has always been a lower wage and lower cost of living region where companies move to cut their overhead. At $15 per hour, how long can Wendy’s stay in business if they sell their hamburgers at just little more than a $1.00? Already such low profit margin businesses are turning to computerized order/payment modules while some are using robots. With liberal Joe’s socialist policies imposed on the South, unemployment will skyrocket along with grinding poverty. This sounds like a return of the Old South after the devastating Reconstruction Era under the liberal North.
During Biden’s recent TV debate with President Trump, he publicly stated he would abolish oil and gas production. One could almost hear a collective gasp from viewers across the states of Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Louisiana where millions would be thrown out of work and the booming Trump economy dealt a death blow.
Democrats and Biden want to give their rich pals a massive tax break by eliminating the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions on federal tax returns. Moore says those living in very high tax states can shift 40% of their high taxes to low tax and no tax states, most of which are in the South.
Socialist Joe wants to bail out states with high unemployment to the tune of $400 billion per year. Taxpayers in low unemployment states in the South will share their wealth with blue states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Karl Marx would be most pleased.
Moore estimates the total cost of Northern reckless economic policies will impoverish the South by more than $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
Greedy Liberal Yankees
Plundering the South for its own benefit is hardly new for Yankee liberals who paint Southerners as backward white supremacists.
Revisionist historians neglect to point out that it was Northern shipbuilders who purchased slaves from Africa and imported them for sale to the South. Although the South is lampooned over cotton and slavery, lost in the conversation is that Northern manufacturers profited handsomely through slavery and the ability to purchase cheap cotton from the South to produce goods.
Colonists fought the American Revolution over taxation by the mother country, yet the new government passed the first U.S. tariff in 1789. For the next 72 years, northern special interest groups used protective tariffs which exploited the South for their own benefit. By 1861, Southerners chose to throw off oppressive taxation by seceding from the Union – just as they had seceded from England earlier – only to be attacked as a new sovereign nation by the North seeking to prevent the loss of its money tree.
The North purchased raw materials, including cotton, from the South to manufacture goods in their factories. High import tariffs against the importation of foreign goods protected these American manufacturers. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs, leaving the South vulnerable to foreign competition. Because Southerners did not manufacture goods, they were forced to buy either high priced Northern manufactured goods or pay the high import tariff on foreign manufactured goods. Either way, big government Northerners profited.
At that time, the tariff produced nearly all of the federal government’s revenue with most coming from Southern imports. Yet the South received little benefit since more than three-fourths of this revenue was spent on government subsidies to build railroads and canals in the North.
Even during the Reconstruction period, the Northern capitalists rigged the railroad freight-rates so that it would cost Southerners a great deal more to ship their manufactured products to the North than it would cost to ship similar loads from the North to the South. This unequal treatment continued until 1945 when Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall mounted a powerful campaign against the railroad and finally embarrassed the Roosevelt administration into equalizing freight rates.
Yankee Wars Against the South
Since the 1830s there have been two wars waged against the South by the North: 1) an economic war by Northern capitalists (often with cooperation by the U.S. government and leaders of the “New South”) to control rigidly the economy of the South, and 2) an ideological war waged by Northern liberals to discredit the history, heritage, culture, and religion of the South and convert white Southerners into liberals.
Even during the colonial era, there always has been a wide cultural divide between the North and South. The South represents conservatism with a Jeffersonian vision of America and small government while the North supports socialism with Hamiltonian big government. The South is the bedrock of Christianity while the North is secular humanist. It is the South that is the bulwark against the race toward totalitarianism and a state religion of secular humanism.
Yet liberal historians claim that slavery – and not the tariff or cultural divisions – was the central focus in middle 19th century America while popular movies tout slavery as the cause of the Civil War. The reality is that slavery was already dying out with the U.S. Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves (1807) and the British Empire the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in England (1807).
From a public relations standpoint, a story about non-slave owning Southerners angry over rising tariffs as the cause for secession does not make for a box office winner or turn public opinion against the South as does the volatile topic of slavery.
Conclusion
If Joe Biden is elected president, we will see the South controlled by labor unions and with high minimum wages, high unemployment, and the taxes owed by liberals in high tax states dumped onto Southerners. With $1.5 trillion being pulled out of the Southern economy, the future of Southerners is dire indeed.
Southerners have no choice but to band together enmasse to stop the Yankee Marxist destruction of their economy and freedoms. But will they? Or will they sit passively by as they have done for decades and, on bended knee, bow at the alter of godlessness and big government?