The plantation system developed for several reasons. The Southern colonies had been founded by companies or proprietors who wished to make a profit, and they accordingly encouraged cash crops like tobacco (in the Chesapeake) and rice (in the Low Country). These crops were labor intensive, which meant that growers turned first to indentured servants and then to African slaves as a labor supply (so, too, did sugar planters in the Caribbean.) They also required a great deal of land and capital, which meant that due to an economic principle called "economies of scale," cash crops, especially rice, favored very wealthy people with large landholdings and access to large labor forces. So in the Southern colonies/United States, the economic realities of staple crop production favored the formation of large farms, or plantations. Cotton, which emerged as the biggest cash crop in the nineteenth-century South, was less shaped by economies of scale--many small planters and farmers could profitably raise the crop. But even still, the largest cotton planters in places like Alabama and Mississippi dominated the Southern economy and increasingly its politics. Large capital investments in land and enslaved people made the production of large amounts of cotton profitable, so the region's dependence on cash crops continued to foster the plantation system.
The Democratic Party asserted dominance in the South after the Compromise of 1877 which effectively ended the Reconstruction and the Republican rule in the South. The promises the Democrats made, to protect and respect the rights of the African American people were not kept and through a series of Jim Crow laws they tried to maintain the control over the black population.
Scarcity is the fundamental challenge that all individuals and nations must confront. Everyone faces some limitations, so we all have to make choices where we limit or allow ourselves to something.
Economists generally recognize four types of economic systems traditional, traditional, command, market and mixed.
A traditional economic system is shaped by tradition. The work that people do, the goods and services they provide, how they exchange resources… all tend to follow a pattern. The traditional system is bad at addressing scarcity because scarcity is formed off of new requirements people have through the ages and a traditional system would not evolve just as our requirements would.
In a planned economy, the government controls the economy. The state decides how to use and distribute resources. The government regulates prices and wages; it may even determine what sorts of work individuals do.
Socialism is a prime example of a planned economy. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with the fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives.
Market economies allow all economic decisions to be made by individuals. The unrestrained interactions between individuals and companies in the marketplace determine what happens to all the good and resources.Individuals choose how to invest their personal resources and individuals decide what to consume. Within a pure market economy, the government is entirely absent from economic affairs.
A mixed economic system combines elements of the market and command economy. Many economic decisions are made in the market by individuals. But the government also plays a role in the allocation and distribution of resources.
If scarcity is looked at on a macro level, the best economic system is mixed because it allows the government to also plays a role in the allocation and distribution of resources, while the individuals still stay happy because they have some control. The only problem is the eternal question of what the right mix between the public and private sectors of the economy should be.
There is no point to look at it on a micro level because almost no country is small enough to be considered on that level.
