
Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government - samclemens
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-slaveholders-controlled-government-matthew-karp
======
jlj
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
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.

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ZeroGravitas
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.

~~~
danieltillett
This why we need to buy out the oil and gas owners. Anything else is just a
heist.

~~~
mark_edward
Would you have compensated the slave drivers for their slaves?

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danieltillett
Yes I would have. Much better than killing half a million people in a
pointless civil war.

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833)

~~~
mark_edward
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?

~~~
danieltillett
If it freed the slaves without bloodshed then yes. The English approach was
much better than the American approach.

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eveningcoffee
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.

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fallingfrog
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.

~~~
runako
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
" 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).

~~~
runako
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.)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Actually, no, you were responding to a post about a hypothetical future
"Lifetime Employment Contract", not about historical American slavery.

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steauengeglase
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.

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mzw_mzw
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
"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.

~~~
oldmanjay
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.

~~~
mwfunk
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.

~~~
rhizome
History describes many examples of completely localized power, and these days
good examples can be viewed through the lens of legality for prosecutorial
misconduct.

