9 ms·

Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government

46 points by samclemens 10y ago

fallingfrog 10y ago
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.
- vasaulys 10y ago
  where can you get offered a Lifetime Employment Contract?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- runako 10y ago
  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.)
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    " 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).
- arjie 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jlj 10y ago
  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) 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" 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-human-trafficking.html https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-hum...
  - jlj 10y ago
    And the people in power of the prizon-industrial complex have a big role in government. Guess not much has changed.
mzw_mzw 10y ago
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.
- rhizome 10y ago
  "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.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    I don't think the solution is to run on explicitly giving more power to the slaveholders.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    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.
    - ersii 10y ago
      Could you elaborate on that? Isn't the power of government based on how many it "governs" and how many ("governed", "voters", "taxpayers") it controls?
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        I could elaborate but won't. Political discussions aren't worth the energy, because people just harden their minds against new ideas I'm not sure how to answer your second question. Yes, but so what?
    - mwfunk 10y ago
      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.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
This, especially the end, reminded me of: https://www.thenation.com/article/new-abolitionism/ 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.
- macawfish 10y ago
  Fascinating perspective! Thanks for sharing.
- s_m_t 10y ago
  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.
  - labster 10y ago
    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.
jlj 10y ago
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
- tomrod 10y ago
  I consider this one of the biggest problems facing the US presently. 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.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
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.
steauengeglase 10y ago
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.

46 points by samclemens 10y ago

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.

vasaulys 10y ago
where can you get offered a Lifetime Employment Contract?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
runako 10y ago
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.)
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  " 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).
arjie 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jlj 10y ago
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) 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" 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-human-trafficking.html https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-hum...
- jlj 10y ago
  And the people in power of the prizon-industrial complex have a big role in government. Guess not much has changed.

mzw_mzw 10y ago

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.

rhizome 10y ago
"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.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  I don't think the solution is to run on explicitly giving more power to the slaveholders.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  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.
  - ersii 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on that? Isn't the power of government based on how many it "governs" and how many ("governed", "voters", "taxpayers") it controls?
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      I could elaborate but won't. Political discussions aren't worth the energy, because people just harden their minds against new ideas I'm not sure how to answer your second question. Yes, but so what?
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    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.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

This, especially the end, reminded me of: https://www.thenation.com/article/new-abolitionism/ 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.

macawfish 10y ago
Fascinating perspective! Thanks for sharing.
s_m_t 10y ago
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.
- labster 10y ago
  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.

jlj 10y ago

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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

tomrod 10y ago
I consider this one of the biggest problems facing the US presently. 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.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

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.

steauengeglase 10y ago

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.