I think there's a nonzero chance that slavery reemerges in a different form in the next century. We're not that far from it now.
Imagine this: you are offered an LEC (Lifetime Employment Contract) with some property owner. The contract states that you are to give the holder of the LEC 8 hours a day of your labor, and that's it. Beatings and other forms of physical punishment are illegal. In return, you get guaranteed room and board, education for you and your kids, free medical care, for life, even into retirement. And in exchange for that contract, they will give you 500,000 dollars. And hey, you can always work extra hours and buy your contract back, right?
Of course, if you learn new skills, your contract will become more valuable, so harder to buy back.. but if your contract is bought for more money, then your new contract holder will likely put you up in a nicer residence anyway.
Would you make that deal? Or the real question is- if you offered that deal to that lady working at the local supermarket checkout counter, would she take that deal? Of course she would.
Slavery is evil and soul-crushing even if it could be stripped of its racial and more brutal elements. But how different is the life of my hypothetical contractual slave from the life of the average low wage worker today? If anything, I'd say they are treated worse now than they would be under slavery. I mean, how free are we really? It seems that the situation described in the article where slaveholders run the government is not too different from our situation today, and I'd argue that people with a lot of power think like slaveholders too.
A lot of people hold the misconception that slavery is simply a system of working without pay. In some times and in some places, possibly that is true. But that's not how it worked in America. We're pretty far from slavery in America now.
There are so many obvious differences, but let's start with the foundation. A slave is not a person and therefore has no more legal rights than my armchair or my goldfish. A slave is personal property, livestock. Being able to enter (and breach) contracts is something people can freely choose to do.
The holder of an LEC would have obligations and limits specified in advance. Beatings: illegal. Room and board must meet certain standards. Any deviation and the LEC laborer can sue for breach. Slaves are livestock and can be treated in the manner of the worst factory farms, subject to the owner's whims. The slaveowner cannot breach a contract with livestock. The very idea is absurd.
> you can always work extra hours and buy your contract back, right?
Say what? No, slaves can't buy anything. Livestock doesn't get to possess anything.
> But how different is the life of my hypothetical contractual slave from the life of the average low wage worker today?
Let's go back to the livestock example. The offspring of livestock are livestock, and under law are also owned by the owner of the parent stock. There is no analogue to this in the world of people with any rights under the law. People can have hopes and dreams for their children; human livestock knows their offspring will suffer as they have, if they are even allowed to meet them before they are sold.
We're pretty far from slavery.
(Yes, there are real slaves even now, but it looks like the OP is referring to poor people and not actual modern slaves.)
" A slave is not a person and therefore has no more legal rights than my armchair or my goldfish."
"No, slaves can't buy anything. "
Your mistake is in assuming that "slavery" is a monolithic phenomenon, with identical details across all of history. It wasn't.
For instance, Roman slaves could own property and earn their own money in their free time, and could in fact buy themselves free. It didn't happen often, but it wasn't impossible. The rights of Roman slaves increased even more during the later periods of Roman history.
Similarly, during the period when Europeans were being enslaved into North Africa by the Barbary corsairs, some freed themselves by converting to Islam (it being technically disallowed to enslave a Muslim).
The linked article, and my comments, are about American slavery. (Since we're being pedantic: it's about slavery in the United States of America, and may not apply over the entire American continents.)
Sounds unlikely. People aren't that valuable. It's much better to be able to hire someone to replace the fellow who just got in an accident than to sink half a million in today dollars on some guy.
It never left. In the US, the Constitution has an exception that allows slavery for people convicted of crimes. I recently learned this after watching the netflix documentary 13th. As a US citizen I felt a bit ignorant that I didn't know this. Would guess that most people don't. Very insightful film.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
Here is the text of that amendment:
"ARTICLE XIII.
Section 1. Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime; whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"
Rants like these are of little meaning as long as the people who insist the government is run by slaveholders keep voting for politicians who want to give the government more power. Put your ballot where your mouth is, guys.
"More power" is naive, all politicians get into the game to exercise power. Small government politics is never about reducing the power of the parts of government you like.
Decentralization of power is not about reducing the power of government, it's about bringing power closer to the governed and reducing the ability of people to misapply the power that there is. Your offhand dismissal shows you aren't looking at the problem from the same perspective.
I'm very much in favor of the concept of keeping government as local as possible/practical, but it's possible that the poster wasn't dismissing the idea, rather how the principle tends to be applied in practice. I frequently see politicians misusing arguments in favor of decentralization as a roundabout way to get rid of some piece of federal legislation they don't like, because then they aren't obligated to argue in favor of the thing the legislation banned. Example: rejecting the abolition of slavery using the argument that such an abolition would have been federal overreach. The person fighting against abolition no longer has to argue in favor of slavery; rather they're claiming to fight in favor of states' rights, which is a much more comfortable argument for them to have. Likewise for Dixiecrats during the Jim Crow days.
I fear that the decentralization argument has been misused in this way so many times that invoking it makes people assume it's an intellectually dishonest, roundabout argument that is selectively promoting states' rights in an attempt to accomplish some other, much more nefarious goal. This is really unfortunate, as I am a big believer in minimizing the role of the federal government wherever it's feasible and practical to do so.
History describes many examples of completely localized power, and these days good examples can be viewed through the lens of legality for prosecutorial misconduct.
Which draws a parallel between the enormous wealth tied up in slaves at the time of abolition and the immense investment in oil and gas reserves that can never be burnt if climate change goals are to be met.
Interesting. I've got a couple of points or questions to put forth if anyone cares to share.
Did the abolishment of slavery in the United States directly lead to any sort of economic depression? From one perspective they were eliminating what the article says was 16% of household wealth at the time, compared to 10 trillion dollars today, so you might expect a corresponding hit to the economy, but whatever productive capacity there was in the form of the slaves labor still existed, more or less, after they were freed. So to non-slave owners it might not effect them at all economically (maybe it might help them in some way, perhaps slavery drags down the market value of labor?).
This, I think, is different from the question of oil. When you abolish the use of oil the oil doesn't go on to produce on its own accord. Any economic gain you once had from oil would presumably vanish completely. And it wouldn't just be the oil owners that lose out, I'm pretty sure I have more wealth because of the economies use of oil even though I don't own any shares of oil companies.
If you abolish the use of fossil fuels, then you get other economic benefits. A portion of 5 million people who would have died every year due to air pollution would continue to produce economically. Those who would have been sickened by respiratory problems instead produce more labor. And we spend less resources treating those illnesses.
And then you spend less money on infrastructure to protect against global warming related disasters. And you eliminate the losses in productivity and infrastructure after global warming-related natural disasters.
And then, if renewable becomes cheap enough, it will be cheaper than extraction, making the oil near worthless (excluding the more difficult to replace uses like metallurgical coal and petroleum based plastics).
The problem is that the extrinsic costs of fossil fuel consumption are never really linked directly to the extraction industry. If you could do that, well, that pile of 10 trillion dollars starts to look a lot smaller.
"During the Civil War, in 1861, President Lincoln drafted an act to be introduced before the legislature of Delaware, one of the four non-free states that remained loyal, for compensated emancipation. However this was narrowly defeated. Lincoln also was behind national legislation towards the same end, but the southern states, now in full rebellion, ignored the proposals.
"Only in the District of Columbia, which fell under direct Federal auspices, was compensated emancipation enacted."
So not only would you have let men walk off scot-free after being slavedrivers, you would have rewarded them with cash. But I bet you care about precedents and incentives right?
That's distinctly counter-factual. The USA never hung slave owners so that didn't cause the civil war. Logically, if they had it would have had to have been after the war. Causality mismatch.
I also don't think you're even considering the suffering caused by the century of racial oppression after that, still continuing with racial motivated police shootings and race riots. This is what would have been avoided if we'd made some attempt at justice.
You're not comparing alternatives if you ignore most of the facts.
I am suggesting that it would have been better for everyone if the slaveowners had been bought out and their slaves freed than to fight a civil war and a unleash a century of Jim Crow oppression on the back of a southern backlash. Oppression and injustice only breeds more injustice.
> Oppression and injustice only breeds more injustice.
Yeah, like paying slavers for owning people. That's going to sit well with the ex-slaves. How are you supposed to ever come to peace with people who beat your father to death and got a government check for doing so?
The Jim Crow, etc, is because we weren't half harsh enough with the slavers, not because we were too rough.
> southern backlash.
That's easily solved. Dead people don't have petulant concerns that they aren't as rich as they were, and they don't riot and foment rebellion.
> I am suggesting that it would have been better for everyone
The highest number? Over what time scale? Measured how? Because the century and a half of racial killings and injustice leaves a lot of headroom for "better".
Are you really suggesting that the North should have killed everyone in the South who was white? I think we have gone past the limits of rational discussion here.
People in the south don’t call the US Civil War the War of Northern Aggression for no reason. Taking people’s property without just compensation and imposing your values on someone else at the end of a gun generates a backlash. It would have been much better to follow the English example and just buy out the slaveowners and end slavery that way.
Not every death penalty-applicable crime actually receives a death sentence. And children of a family who owned slaves shouldn't have been punished, of course.
And how many people would we have had to try? Actually, not that many...
"""The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves). - http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm"""
> It would have been much better to follow the English example and just buy out the slaveowners and end slavery that way.
That wouldn't have prevented the war. But, we essentially did buy them out by letting them keep the proceeds of their crimes.
What would have been better was something that would heal the racial divide; punishment and restitution. And there was neither.
Are you really claiming that the US civil war was not fought over the issue of slavery?
What would have healed the issue of racial divide is for all sides to have approached the problem with good will and compromise. One side imposing their will at the point of a gun only creates further ill will.
You do know that living next to the guy who beat your dad to death for his race isn't exactly conducive to peace.
The proof is the fact that over a century later people still commit racial motivated murders because they despise the people their ancestors kept as cattle.
If they didn't want to get hung they shouldn't have been, you know, slavers...
Yes, I am 100% claiming the US Civil war was not fought over the issue of slavery. Lincoln said he would have dropped the issue entirely to keep the union together. Many whites were against slavery but not enough to pick up a gun and go to war.
We don't worry about "further ill will" when we execute mass murderers. And slavers are worse than Charles Manson.
But a country doesn't benefit from brutality. A fair compromise would be to execute them quickly, with no torture.
Yes Lincoln would have dropped the issue, but the southern slave states knew the writing was on the wall. The historical balance between free and slave states was breaking down in 1850s and the slave states knew that it was only a matter of time before the more populous free states imposed their will on the south.
The south chose to break away from the USA because they feared being expropriated of their wealth (most of the capital in the southern states was tied up in slaves). If the united states had chosen a path of full compensation to slave owners the civil war may have been avoided.
I am not supporting slavery, just suggesting that the solution to issues like ending slavery (and carbon emissions) is better solved peacefully and with compensation than by force and war.
> I am not supporting slavery, just suggesting that the solution to issues like ending slavery (and carbon emissions) is better solved peacefully and with compensation than by force and war.
Not really, because then you're still left with slavers. And as soon as it's advantageous they'll just start slaving all over again.
When someone thinks you're absolutely worthless there's no middle ground.
They've been stealing from the whole rest of the world in the form of pollution for decades. Why should I feel bad about taking back some small portion of that?
It is not a matter about feeling bad, but about getting the right result. If we don't buy out the oil and other carbon owners then they will continue to fight us doing anything about carbon emissions. It is better to pay the Danegeld and move on.
Watch 13th on Netflix, slavery is still here in the US. The Constitution legalizes it for people convicted of crimes and there is a big business built around it.
Unfortunately this was the status quo of the time all over the world until the things started to change slowly. It took almost one century to settle most of this issue around the world, maybe even longer and is still not completely settled or even solved.
When I look back to this time I feel so ashamed (full disclosure: I am not an American), even though some of my predecessors went through a similar hardship.
Unfortunately the value of human life has again started to devaluate. If you print money without backing it up with some real value you will get inflation. Unfortunately if you increase the size of human population the same thing starts to happen from some threshold from where there just are no resources to provide the expected "riches" for every human being.
Then what ever we do will make someone to suffer. Our only hope is then to expand.
Thanks for the suggestion, I picked it up on Kindle and will give it a go over the weekend. Granted I'm not sure if I can handle too many more Marxist views of the Antebellum South --especially if they are name dropping Hofstadter.
51 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadImagine this: you are offered an LEC (Lifetime Employment Contract) with some property owner. The contract states that you are to give the holder of the LEC 8 hours a day of your labor, and that's it. Beatings and other forms of physical punishment are illegal. In return, you get guaranteed room and board, education for you and your kids, free medical care, for life, even into retirement. And in exchange for that contract, they will give you 500,000 dollars. And hey, you can always work extra hours and buy your contract back, right? Of course, if you learn new skills, your contract will become more valuable, so harder to buy back.. but if your contract is bought for more money, then your new contract holder will likely put you up in a nicer residence anyway. Would you make that deal? Or the real question is- if you offered that deal to that lady working at the local supermarket checkout counter, would she take that deal? Of course she would. Slavery is evil and soul-crushing even if it could be stripped of its racial and more brutal elements. But how different is the life of my hypothetical contractual slave from the life of the average low wage worker today? If anything, I'd say they are treated worse now than they would be under slavery. I mean, how free are we really? It seems that the situation described in the article where slaveholders run the government is not too different from our situation today, and I'd argue that people with a lot of power think like slaveholders too.
There are so many obvious differences, but let's start with the foundation. A slave is not a person and therefore has no more legal rights than my armchair or my goldfish. A slave is personal property, livestock. Being able to enter (and breach) contracts is something people can freely choose to do.
The holder of an LEC would have obligations and limits specified in advance. Beatings: illegal. Room and board must meet certain standards. Any deviation and the LEC laborer can sue for breach. Slaves are livestock and can be treated in the manner of the worst factory farms, subject to the owner's whims. The slaveowner cannot breach a contract with livestock. The very idea is absurd.
> you can always work extra hours and buy your contract back, right?
Say what? No, slaves can't buy anything. Livestock doesn't get to possess anything.
> But how different is the life of my hypothetical contractual slave from the life of the average low wage worker today?
Let's go back to the livestock example. The offspring of livestock are livestock, and under law are also owned by the owner of the parent stock. There is no analogue to this in the world of people with any rights under the law. People can have hopes and dreams for their children; human livestock knows their offspring will suffer as they have, if they are even allowed to meet them before they are sold.
We're pretty far from slavery.
(Yes, there are real slaves even now, but it looks like the OP is referring to poor people and not actual modern slaves.)
"No, slaves can't buy anything. "
Your mistake is in assuming that "slavery" is a monolithic phenomenon, with identical details across all of history. It wasn't.
For instance, Roman slaves could own property and earn their own money in their free time, and could in fact buy themselves free. It didn't happen often, but it wasn't impossible. The rights of Roman slaves increased even more during the later periods of Roman history.
Similarly, during the period when Europeans were being enslaved into North Africa by the Barbary corsairs, some freed themselves by converting to Islam (it being technically disallowed to enslave a Muslim).
Here is the text of that amendment: "ARTICLE XIII. Section 1. Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime; whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"
And globally, human trafficking is a huge problem. It is another term for modern day slavery. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-hum...
Isn't the power of government based on how many it "governs" and how many ("governed", "voters", "taxpayers") it controls?
I'm not sure how to answer your second question. Yes, but so what?
I fear that the decentralization argument has been misused in this way so many times that invoking it makes people assume it's an intellectually dishonest, roundabout argument that is selectively promoting states' rights in an attempt to accomplish some other, much more nefarious goal. This is really unfortunate, as I am a big believer in minimizing the role of the federal government wherever it's feasible and practical to do so.
Since you're the first to mention decentralization, I think I can be excused for not accounting for whatever it is you mean by it.
https://www.thenation.com/article/new-abolitionism/
Which draws a parallel between the enormous wealth tied up in slaves at the time of abolition and the immense investment in oil and gas reserves that can never be burnt if climate change goals are to be met.
Did the abolishment of slavery in the United States directly lead to any sort of economic depression? From one perspective they were eliminating what the article says was 16% of household wealth at the time, compared to 10 trillion dollars today, so you might expect a corresponding hit to the economy, but whatever productive capacity there was in the form of the slaves labor still existed, more or less, after they were freed. So to non-slave owners it might not effect them at all economically (maybe it might help them in some way, perhaps slavery drags down the market value of labor?).
This, I think, is different from the question of oil. When you abolish the use of oil the oil doesn't go on to produce on its own accord. Any economic gain you once had from oil would presumably vanish completely. And it wouldn't just be the oil owners that lose out, I'm pretty sure I have more wealth because of the economies use of oil even though I don't own any shares of oil companies.
And then you spend less money on infrastructure to protect against global warming related disasters. And you eliminate the losses in productivity and infrastructure after global warming-related natural disasters.
And then, if renewable becomes cheap enough, it will be cheaper than extraction, making the oil near worthless (excluding the more difficult to replace uses like metallurgical coal and petroleum based plastics).
The problem is that the extrinsic costs of fossil fuel consumption are never really linked directly to the extraction industry. If you could do that, well, that pile of 10 trillion dollars starts to look a lot smaller.
Actually the English bought out the slave owners in the West Indies when they outlawed slavery and it worked fine [1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_emancipation
"During the Civil War, in 1861, President Lincoln drafted an act to be introduced before the legislature of Delaware, one of the four non-free states that remained loyal, for compensated emancipation. However this was narrowly defeated. Lincoln also was behind national legislation towards the same end, but the southern states, now in full rebellion, ignored the proposals.
"Only in the District of Columbia, which fell under direct Federal auspices, was compensated emancipation enacted."
It's our failure to deal with tough issues like this definitively, that causes problems to linger for centuries.
As distasteful as it is to compensate slave owners or oil companies the alternative is worse.
I also don't think you're even considering the suffering caused by the century of racial oppression after that, still continuing with racial motivated police shootings and race riots. This is what would have been avoided if we'd made some attempt at justice.
You're not comparing alternatives if you ignore most of the facts.
Yeah, like paying slavers for owning people. That's going to sit well with the ex-slaves. How are you supposed to ever come to peace with people who beat your father to death and got a government check for doing so?
The Jim Crow, etc, is because we weren't half harsh enough with the slavers, not because we were too rough.
> southern backlash.
That's easily solved. Dead people don't have petulant concerns that they aren't as rich as they were, and they don't riot and foment rebellion.
> I am suggesting that it would have been better for everyone
The highest number? Over what time scale? Measured how? Because the century and a half of racial killings and injustice leaves a lot of headroom for "better".
People in the south don’t call the US Civil War the War of Northern Aggression for no reason. Taking people’s property without just compensation and imposing your values on someone else at the end of a gun generates a backlash. It would have been much better to follow the English example and just buy out the slaveowners and end slavery that way.
Not every death penalty-applicable crime actually receives a death sentence. And children of a family who owned slaves shouldn't have been punished, of course.
And how many people would we have had to try? Actually, not that many...
"""The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves). - http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm"""
> It would have been much better to follow the English example and just buy out the slaveowners and end slavery that way.
That wouldn't have prevented the war. But, we essentially did buy them out by letting them keep the proceeds of their crimes.
What would have been better was something that would heal the racial divide; punishment and restitution. And there was neither.
What would have healed the issue of racial divide is for all sides to have approached the problem with good will and compromise. One side imposing their will at the point of a gun only creates further ill will.
Oh you mean like the slavedrivers did for centuries?
The proof is the fact that over a century later people still commit racial motivated murders because they despise the people their ancestors kept as cattle.
If they didn't want to get hung they shouldn't have been, you know, slavers...
We don't worry about "further ill will" when we execute mass murderers. And slavers are worse than Charles Manson.
But a country doesn't benefit from brutality. A fair compromise would be to execute them quickly, with no torture.
The south chose to break away from the USA because they feared being expropriated of their wealth (most of the capital in the southern states was tied up in slaves). If the united states had chosen a path of full compensation to slave owners the civil war may have been avoided.
I am not supporting slavery, just suggesting that the solution to issues like ending slavery (and carbon emissions) is better solved peacefully and with compensation than by force and war.
Not really, because then you're still left with slavers. And as soon as it's advantageous they'll just start slaving all over again.
When someone thinks you're absolutely worthless there's no middle ground.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
It has deep connections to the war on drugs, to institutionalized racism, and a number of other darker areas we have a hard time talking about.
Thank you for pointing it out.
When I look back to this time I feel so ashamed (full disclosure: I am not an American), even though some of my predecessors went through a similar hardship.
Unfortunately the value of human life has again started to devaluate. If you print money without backing it up with some real value you will get inflation. Unfortunately if you increase the size of human population the same thing starts to happen from some threshold from where there just are no resources to provide the expected "riches" for every human being.
Then what ever we do will make someone to suffer. Our only hope is then to expand.