[true_religion]

I’ve always wondered why people reframing the civil war to be about economics rather than slavery, don’t consider slaves are part of the economy (and that slavery itself is a perversion of an economic system).

If you value free market economics, like we so often do today, then step one ought to be free mobility of labor which means laborers ought to be literally free of physical chains binding them to their “employers”.

[Zenst]

You have to ask - if there was no cotten export industry of such a scale, would we of had still had slavery at the scale it was in that era?

[true_religion]

If nothing replaced cotton, then probably not, but there are other goods than could have substituted. And of course, eventually someone would have had the bright idea of using slaves in factories and coal mines. In the end it’s hard to avoid slavery by merely being resource poor.

Even in the worst environments, some small elite will always benefit by enslaving the rest of the populace. Take for example, the Danes taking English slaves. It was not an economy bursting with productivity and wealth, yet slavery still existed because “elite” warriors didn’t want to wash their own clothes or grow their own crops or make their own entertainment.

This is why I called slavery an economic perversion. There is no job that can’t be done by someone enslaved. Slaves may start as field workers, but they eventually become supervisors. From bed warmers to dancers, singers, and composers. From household servants, they become palace chefs. From nannies they become tutors. From handmaids they become house stewards and accountants. If the practice isn’t stamped out (or restricted via laws such as a caste system since mere social pressure won’t stop the elite from maximizing profit from more educated slaves), it just grows more varied.

I would bet if institutional slavery existed legally today, even computer programmers would face stiff competition from that source rather than having to worry about jobs being outsourced.