[eric-hu]

> Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".

This definition of slavery sounds a lot like capitalism.

[jaggederest]

It turns out, in an economic sense anyway, that paying people wages can be qualitatively worse than slavery.

To delve into the macabre, you can pay people less than the cost of maintaining a slave to do the same work, and those people are not a capital expenditure but an operational one, i.e. you don't take a loss if they happen to starve, get sick, or quit, you just hire someone else.