[LinXitoW]

Now, that's all just regulations. What are regulations but laws that restrict/govern the way to do commerce? Anti-slavery is part of that, just like every other concession we've had to pry from the hands of capitalists over the last 100 years, like no child labor, no locking workers into factories, PPE, etc...

[sophrosyne42]

You're free to call contract law and private property law "regulations", but recognize that these branches of law have very different properties, history, and functions than what we traditionally refer to by regulations. Traditionally, when people talk about regulations they are talking about legislation, i.e., rules and decrees created by a legislative body, voted into law by some parliamentary body or created by an executive agency to support decrees of a parliamentary or similar body with the power to declare law. You can think of this as legislation or declaratory law.

Contrast this with contract and property law. These laws were created primarily out of common law, a long evolutionary process arising out of series of decisions from a judiciary attempting to reconcile conflicts between the parties. This is judicial or conciliatory law.

Crucially, most if not all the advances and the rise of extreme productivity from capitalism that supports populations in excess of 8 billion as opposed to about 0.5 billion, have come from emphasis and pre-eminence on the latter kind of law and the smashing of the former kind of law, i.e., the destruction of the guild system of privileges, removing or minimizing protectionist laws, etc. And the former kind of law has either been nominal, merely codifying the advances caused by the latter law like in the case of child labor, or it has been reactionary and hampered the progress of the latter sort of law.