It's Confederate History Month in Dixie

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

You are obviously just trolling now.

Yes, being concerned about the welfare of those held in bondage is trolling. How is giving freed slaves "backpay" a bad idea, nevermind trolling?

While such sentiments are admirable, "horrible injustice" is of course subjective. That is why the law exists; and under your scenario, your solution is unconstitutional.

Slavery isn't a horrible injustice? Fascinating.

Well, in Mexico after independence from Spain, various groups of people such as the Indians and country peasants were essentially endentured slaves to large land owners. While technically not slaves under the law, "debt slavery" was a common term among the populists of the time. After the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the politicians decided to correct this horrible injustice by simply taking land from the owners and distributing it among the workers through the ejidos system. Naturally, productivity and output collapsed due to the reasons Drone mentioned. (Laborers are not farmers; and it takes more than working on a farm to understand how to farm.) Worse, unlike America's black population after slavery was abolished who were at least mobile and could seek employment/opportunities elsewhere, those Mexican's were tied to their land and lives of subsistence farming. (With the exception of black sharecroppers, who shared much the same fate as the Mexican peasantry.) In a bid to increase productivity, the Mexican government abandoned further land distribution in the 90s.

Were the lands given to the people who had worked them, or to peasants in general. And if we must defend slaveowner's plantations in the name of productivity, what do you think of my suggestion that freed slaves be paid the wages they should've earned if they were white laborers? Keep in mind that that is much less than the value the slaveowners received from having those slaves.