In a system with bride price, girls are assets and in times of trouble a family may marry off their daughters to ensure both their daughters and themselves a better future, thus encouraging lower marriage ages. In a system with a dowry, daughters are a burden and in times of trouble a family would delay marrying off their daughters, perhaps never having an opportunity for them to marry at all - thus raising average marriage age but also keeping population growth in check with the result that those who did reproduce would on average be both wealthier and more intelligent than those who did not. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages, but obviously are pushing behavior in opposite directions.

So was this just semantics? In one sense, yes - the original correction was simply to define the terms, to let you know that you meant brideprice, not dowry. The reasonable thing to have done would have been to agree that yes, you meant brideprice, not dowry - but instead you want to be "right" by pointing out that lots of people use "dowry" wrong. Yes, they do, but now that you know that the two are very different you should just be more careful about using the right word, not trying to argue that they are the really the same when they obviously are not.

In short, get over yourself. You made a small mistake that lots of people make about a subject that few people learn the details about any more. There's no shame in that. But now, instead of accepting that you made a small error you want to double down and say black is white - and then continue on by introducing some more misreadings of history (though again, common misreadings).

As for Home Owner Associations - they can exist inside and outside of cities, and they are probably most common in suburbs. They exist independently of the tax system. Most people who really move outside of the city don't pay Home Owner Association fees. HOAs are mainly about providing a neighborhood some protection from people with low standards moving in and ruining the neighborhood, as the sort of people who are habitually violent or larcenous tend to be the sort of people who won't keep up their lawn or comply with the other HOA rules either, so this gives the neighbors a chance to get rid of them and keep their neighborhood safe. Despite horror stories about awful HOA rules, the vast majority of HOAs are fairly reasonable in both rules and enforcement. Get far enough into the country and HOAs are unneeded and rare because the dregs of society prefer the ease of living in the city to the hardships of the rural life, and if they should make it out to the countryside ... well, country folk have their own, extralegal ways of dealing with such people - something that can work when you have a homogenous, inter-related population where the people know how to keep their mouths shut.

Your perspective on slavery is also incorrect. Yes, abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral, but they believed it was immoral primarily because the slaves were not compelled to work as hard as free persons must work in order to survive. At the time, the average slave worked 6 hours per day while the average white worker worked 14 hours per day, and a slave was less likely to be whipped over the course of their life than a free white worker. Quite a few abolitionists considered the Southern slave system to be an institution that protected slaves from the rigors of the world, and predicted that with the fall of the slave system the black race would soon die out within the United States. They objected to the entrance of new slave states into the Union because they wanted to prevent black people from settling in those territories - and they knew that if they were admitted as slave states then slave owners would move there and bring their slaves with them. Meanwhile, many Southerners - possibly even a majority - wanted to end slavery but couldn't figure out a good way to do it that would not cause more trouble than it solved. You would never know it after a century and a half of propaganda, but the majority of slaves were reasonably happy with their lot in life. Federal workers who recorded the narratives of ex-slaves in the 1930s found that over one third of the former slaves actually preferred slavery to freedom, even after over sixty years of freedom. During the war it is notable that despite numerous attempts to stir up a slave revolt by the federal forces, there was not a single slave revolt in the Confederacy. A good many slaves deserted their plantations, but there was not a single organized revolt even while most of the men of fighting age were away from their homes. Even the claim that slaves had no say over their lot in life is untrue: there were existing routes to freedom for those slaves who wished it. A slave could work for themself in their free hours and earn enough to buy their own freedom. A few ex-slaves even became wealthy, and they or their sons fought for the Confederacy during the war. There were more free blacks in the Southern States at the time the war began than there were in the North.

Which is not to say that slavery was a desirable institution, of course - simply that once again your framing of the issue bears little resemblance to reality. Perhaps you need a break.




Baldur