[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.