6 ms·

> to let people do something let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive. much more impressive than banning slavery.

roenxi 6y ago
If people just banned slaves for moral reasons, they'd have come back eventually for economic ones. Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. This wasn't because people suddenly realised the slaves weren't having fun, or suddenly after millennia of religion someone decided to take the 'be nice to people' dogma seriously. Neither of those things take centuries to figure out. The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. Slavery is a great example of liberating people to do things being much more impressive than bans. Banning slavery was a big step that sped the whole process up by a few decades, but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create. > let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive. Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s. No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    > By 2017, 60% of the Libyan population were malnourished. Since then, 1.3 million people are waiting for emergency humanitarian aid, out of a total population of 6.4 million [0] I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that. Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away. Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy
    - tremon 6y ago
      Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away. That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        I can substantiate it with Libya - it had one of the highest GDP per capita in the world for a bit (same wiki page). But they couldn't sustain that because they have the sort of economy where slavery makes sense. The Saudis and Qatarians will be the same when the oil runs out. An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.
        croon 6y ago
        Two points: 1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost. Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former. 2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making. Because it naturally leads to: a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary. which leads to: b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth. I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable? Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?
        throwaway201103 6y ago
        No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality. But I think it is also true that slaves (at least as a source of agricultural labor) were becoming economically unviable regardless, due to advances in technology. Mechanized harvesting and other agricultural mechanization was just less expensive than using (and housing, and feeding) people to do the same work.
  - ozborn 6y ago
    It is not flourishing, it is underground and/or illegal in almost every country in the world. Your example of Libya shows just how badly governance has to break down in order for slavery to regain even a shadow of its former importance. The number of people enslaved has gone from substantial portions of humanity to a fringe activity, mostly on the margins of society. The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me. To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here? Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.
- croon 6y ago
  > but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create. Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners. So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    > but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners. A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives. Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
    - croon 6y ago
      > A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically none left because nobody would want one. [citation needed] > Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees. I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions. Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".
    - 6y ago
- phaemon 6y ago
  > Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s. This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Good point. I mistyped and changed my comment to say "through". And that shows slavery halving as a % of the population.
    - phaemon 6y ago
      So now you're saying that "slavery started to fade away" as soon as it was abolished but it had nothing to do with the actual abolition? Just co-incidence? And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        Banning slavery had a big effect. But the ban wouldn't hold if slavery made economic sense. It isn't as though the the people were suddenly imbued with a moral spirit - we've had human history for literal millennia. Slavery being bad for slaves is not a complicated concept, people knew about that forever. Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.
- rob74 6y ago
  > Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment. The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves. The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.
grecy 6y ago
> let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive. Both Canada and Australia have had legal injecting rooms for many, many years.

roenxi 6y ago

If people just banned slaves for moral reasons, they'd have come back eventually for economic ones. Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. This wasn't because people suddenly realised the slaves weren't having fun, or suddenly after millennia of religion someone decided to take the 'be nice to people' dogma seriously. Neither of those things take centuries to figure out. The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. Slavery is a great example of liberating people to do things being much more impressive than bans. Banning slavery was a big step that sped the whole process up by a few decades, but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create. > let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive. Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.

goatinaboat 6y ago
Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s. No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > By 2017, 60% of the Libyan population were malnourished. Since then, 1.3 million people are waiting for emergency humanitarian aid, out of a total population of 6.4 million [0] I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that. Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away. Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy
  - tremon 6y ago
    Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away. That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      I can substantiate it with Libya - it had one of the highest GDP per capita in the world for a bit (same wiki page). But they couldn't sustain that because they have the sort of economy where slavery makes sense. The Saudis and Qatarians will be the same when the oil runs out. An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.
      - croon 6y ago
        Two points: 1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost. Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former. 2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making. Because it naturally leads to: a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary. which leads to: b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth. I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable? Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?
        throwaway201103 6y ago
        No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality. But I think it is also true that slaves (at least as a source of agricultural labor) were becoming economically unviable regardless, due to advances in technology. Mechanized harvesting and other agricultural mechanization was just less expensive than using (and housing, and feeding) people to do the same work.
- ozborn 6y ago
  It is not flourishing, it is underground and/or illegal in almost every country in the world. Your example of Libya shows just how badly governance has to break down in order for slavery to regain even a shadow of its former importance. The number of people enslaved has gone from substantial portions of humanity to a fringe activity, mostly on the margins of society. The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me. To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here? Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.
croon 6y ago
> but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create. Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners. So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners. A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives. Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
  - croon 6y ago
    > A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically none left because nobody would want one. [citation needed] > Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees. I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions. Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".
  - 6y ago
phaemon 6y ago
> Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s. This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
- roenxi 6y ago
  Good point. I mistyped and changed my comment to say "through". And that shows slavery halving as a % of the population.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    So now you're saying that "slavery started to fade away" as soon as it was abolished but it had nothing to do with the actual abolition? Just co-incidence? And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Banning slavery had a big effect. But the ban wouldn't hold if slavery made economic sense. It isn't as though the the people were suddenly imbued with a moral spirit - we've had human history for literal millennia. Slavery being bad for slaves is not a complicated concept, people knew about that forever. Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.
rob74 6y ago
> Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment. The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...
gamblor956 6y ago
Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves. The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.

grecy 6y ago

> let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive. Both Canada and Australia have had legal injecting rooms for many, many years.