[einhverfr]

No, I was responding to the idea that things have improved in the last 40 years. I am not sure they have. There are some ways in which they have, but in other ways we have slid further back.

> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.

Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.

> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.

Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.