Statists argue that government benefits mankind by managing the “unfettered free market,” guiding progress and protecting us from harm.

In his book Man Makes Himself, Gordon Childe outlines the history of human progress in the 2,000 years prior to the Egyptian Empire (the first “great civilization”) with the contributions made:

The two millennia immediately preceding 3000 B.C. had witnessed discoveries in applied science that directly or indirectly affected the prosperity of millions of men and demonstrably furthered the biological welfare of our species by facilitating its multiplication. We have mentioned the following applications of science: artificial irrigation using canals and ditches; the plow; the harnessing of animal motive-power; the sailboat; wheeled vehicles; orchard-husbandry; fermentation; the production and use of copper; bricks; the arch; glazing; the seal; and – in the earliest stages of the revolution – a solar calendar, writing, numeral notation, and bronze…

The 2,000 years after the revolution, say from 2600 to 600 BC – the entire span of Egypt – yielded only four contributions: decimal notation; an economic method for smelting iron; truly alphabetic scripts; and aqueducts for supplying water to cities.

In fact, two of those developments – alphabets and iron smelting, were developed in areas on the fringe of empire.

In the period of the rise of the state, mythology and control take over and human progress suffers. Innovation is stifled, scientific discovery is hampered.  The wealth created by innovation is diverted from funding further research and progress to the ruling class in the state.  The parasite draws from the host in wealth, productivity, and innovation.  Mankind suffers.

(H/T to Brett Veinotte at School Sucks Podcast)

I Just finished reading “They thought they were free:  The Germans 1933-45.”  Milton Mayer was an American professor who lived in postwar Germany.  He wrote this book in 1955.

There were several parallels I found between the individuals living in Nazi Germany and the people in modern day America.  But most prominent in my highlighting was the following:

Mayer asked a German professor why he did not resist the Nazis, and he replied:

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One does not see exactly when to [take a stand]…Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.  You wait for the next and the next.  You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

Tyranny does not happen overnight.  It is not an event as so conveniently illustrated in history books.  Tyranny comes step-by-step, in gradual form.  Like the boiling frog, continually accustomed to warmer water, good people give in to tyranny for expediency, for personal interests, and for the good of the many.

But what is your “line in the sand?”  Do you have one?  When does the state go too far?

I posit that most people do not have a line in the sand.  In today’s terms, those who object to the next level of government control over health care will lose the battle with congress (already done) and will, over time, stop arguing about it.  In several years, they’ll be arguing within the realm of that current reality, when health care gets worse, and arguing for more state intervention to make it better.  The question as to whether the state should be involved at all will be bygone.

Good people settled bit by bit, day by day, with the tyranny that overtook Germany because it was gradual and incremental.  No one wanted to stand outside the norm and be a radical, scorned by public opinion.   The best thinkers could see where it was going, but were certain that the consequences would be visible to all in some event.  They were wrong.

That, my friends, is the slippery slope defined.

One of the more interesting (of many) paradoxes of statism is that people simultaneously esteem and loathe politicians.  Most would deny the former sentiment, but a belief that the state is a collection of experts tasked with running society and the economy betrays that denial.  Further, this esteem is  manifest in their reference to politicians as “leaders,” “authorities,” and “officials.”

The elephant in the subconscious tells the individual that the political class wields power over them, but the discomfort of this nagging truth is alleviated by labeling politicians and bureaucrats as “public servants,” with statements such as “we are the government,” mitigated by the belief that “we” hold ultimate power with our vote.  After all, we can “throw the rascals out” anytime they don’t do our bidding.

But even more powerful is the assumption that politicians act in “our” best interest, that the people who enter into the realm of “public service” do so to help others, which implies that they are on a higher moral plane than the average person.  As for the government bureaucrats, it is assumed that they are necessary to fulfill societal needs that cannot, or would not, be provided without a government.  In the case of welfare, for example, this implies that the rest of us would not take care of our fellow man because people are greedy and self-interested,  but those who enter into “public service” do care, and that their willingness to step up and provide something that other people will not indicates a higher degree of honor and selflessness.

Here’s the key:  This entity we call government is nothing more than a collection of individuals, and ALL individuals act in their self interest.

Politicians are not altruists.  They do not care about people any more than any of the rest of us. They don’t subordinate themselves to “serve” others. There is no such thing as selflessness. Any choice that an individual makes is an expression of self interest – even the most charitable act is performed because it provides psychic reward to the individual.

But politics is not charity.  Politicians and government bureaucrats are not “serving” the rest of society, they’re pursuing their self interest, and those interests are either the attainment of power over other people, or a cushy, stable job with lucrative benefits from which one is unlikely to ever be fired.

When you build an institution that has a monopoly on the use of force, the people who will aspire to join its ranks are those who wish to wield that power over others; to reward their friends and punish their enemies.  They’ll ally themselves with the worst element of the private sector that will provide them with wealth in exchange for protection from competition in the marketplace.

It is difficult to attain wealth and status in a free market – these people are unfit for such enterprise.  They use force to get what they want.  They steal and call it taxation.  They murder and call it war.  They rob the people of their liberty under the guise of protecting them.  They impoverish future generations while they plunder the present and steal from the future with debt.  They are authoritarian sociopaths representing the worst element of humanity.  Politicians and high-level bureaucrats are not to be regarded with esteem, but derided with scorn.

As for the low-level bureaucrats, most people are reluctant to hold them accountable for all the theft, murder, and mayhem resulting from the dictates of their superordinates – after all, they’re just another one of us – average people looking for a stable job with good benefits.  When they push mounds of paper on us, collect the taxes, and carry out the use of force against their fellow man as commanded by the politicians and high-level bureaucrats, they’re just “doing their job.”

This vox populi is reinforced by the notion that low-level bureaucrats (as well as the high-level bureaucrats and politicians) pay taxes like the rest of us.  But let’s analyze this:

Why do government employees pay taxes?

Imagine a band of stagecoach robbers with one dominant leader.  After a successful pillaging of some hapless travelers, they divvy up the booty.  The gang leader takes his cut, then distributes shares to the henchmen.  Then he demands that each henchman give back 30% of what they just received.  Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just give them 30% less in the first place?  The money the state expropriates from the productive sector pays for the cost of government. “Taxes” paid by government employees are nothing more than an exercise in moving money from the right hand to the left, and then back to the right.  It’s a shell game designed to blur the distinction between the productive sector and the thieves who rob them of their wealth, to mask their plunder and make it appear as though they are “one of us,”  just another taxpaying citizen.

If they did not pay taxes, it would make it clear that they do not obtain their money by adding value in the productive sector like the rest of society.  It would reveal them as a separate class of individuals who live off the wealth created by the production of the underclass; as nothing more than a garden-variety parasite.

The most menial job in the marketplace is nobler than that of a politician or bureaucrat, because the common laborer earns his wage through voluntary exchange, providing products and services to people that have a choice to buy or not buy.  He must satisfy his customers to survive.  Government is a monopoly; there is no choice.  You pay whether you value the “service” or not, and it doesn’t matter if you’re left unsatisfied, you can’t take your business elsewhere.

Politicians and bureaucrats are nothing more than a band of thieves writ large, with less honor than the common highwayman.

It is Us and Them, and from their perspective they are the privileged class, we are mere mundanes who must submit to their rule and produce – so that they may leech from our productivity.

An Introduction to the Non-Aggression Principle

This is the first post in a series, in which I will define and apply the Non-Aggression Principle to issues of moral and ethical confusion.

The NAP in three easy sentences:

1. You have the right to your life, liberty, and property.
2. You do not have the right to aggress against the life, liberty or property of another.
3. You cannot delegate a right that you do not have.

Steps one and two are easy.  In fact, it is the general philosophy that the vast majority of people operate under  in their day-to-day lives and in their interaction with others.

Step three is where the vast majority of people fail, due to their indoctrination into the immoral idealogy of statism.  The very idea of government is a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle, and an individual’s belief in government is the root of the personal moral and ethical conflict he faces when advocating government action.

Government is the Means by Which we use Violence Against our Fellow Man.

If you don’t have the right to use violence against your neighbor’s life, liberty, or property then you cannot delegate that right to another person, nor a group of people calling themselves “government.”

An Example

If you don’t like the fence your neighbor is putting on his property,  you can either use persuasion and tact to express your opinion and try to get him to change his mind – or perhaps get several of your other neighbors together who share your concern and address him as a group.  If it’s that important to all of you, perhaps you can even offer to contribute funds to help him pay for a fence that is more to your liking.

What if he still refuses, and proceeds with his plans?  Well, you could march right over to his house, call him out, and beat him profusely until he agrees to do things your way.  Of course, that would be immoral and a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle – and, more importantly, your actions will have consequences.  Perhaps you wind up on the short end of the stick, and find yourself bloodied in the street picking up your teeth.  Or perhaps he gets you back later, or maybe the rest of your neighbors come after you for using violence against him.

The point is that there is a reason we don’t aggress against our neighbors as a general rule.  We understand that it is immoral and unethical, and we understand that there are usually consequences for our actions.

So this is where step three comes in:  Instead of aggressing against him ourselves, we go to the local shop-of-thugs calling themselves government, and use them to go after our neighbor.  If there isn’t already a fencing ordinance telling him what he can do with his property, maybe we can persuade the band of thugs to pass one.  Then they’ll go to his house as our “representative” and demand that the neighbor do with his property as we wish him to do, irrespective of his property rights.  What are the consequences if he refuses?  Threats of fines and imprisonment.  And what if he should stand his ground, assert his property rights, and demand that he be left alone?  The local thugs will send their enforcement arm to his property, and if he should resist them and defend his property, they will bludgeon him with their batons, administer him 50 thousand volts of electro-shock with their portable torture devices, or – ultimately – kill him should he have the temerity to fight the aggressors.

All of this because we don’t respect the property rights of our neighbors, and we are willing to use force against him to make him do as we would like him to do with his property.

You don’t have the right to violate his property,  you don’t have the right to use violence against him, and you can’t delegate a right that you don’t hold yourself.  You cannot appoint a representative to do your violence for you, it is just as immoral as doing the violence yourself.

Indoctrinated with 13+ years of immoral statist idealogy, most individuals cannot accept the third statement of the NAP – it slams into their own cognitive dissonance, that self-protective reflex that protects them from being wrong, that tells them that the state is not violence, that the state is “us” and it acts in “our” best interests.

The fact is that the state is nothing more than a monopoly on the use of violence.  It is the gun in the room that no one wants to acknowledge.  It is the means by which we use violence against our fellow man.

Understanding and embracing the Non-Aggression Principle is the key to liberty and a peaceful, prosperous society of individuals acting in their own interest while respecting the rights of others.  I will be writing a series of entries on the NAP, and it has its own category link in the left-hand navigation.

On Christmas Day 2009, twenty-three year old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to ignite an explosive device aboard Northwest flight 253 as it approached Detroit.  The details are still coming in, but it appears as though he had only partially ignited the explosives attached to his leg, causing a flash and smoke setting himself on fire , but failing to cause catastrophic damage to the airplane and its 289 passengers.  Alert individuals and crew were able to subdue the attacker before he succeeded in his plan to take the plane down.

There are several important points to consider in the midst of this media frenzy:

Lesson One:  The state did nothing to protect you.

Despite being in the “orange” state of high threat level to domestic and international air travel since 2006, despite billions of dollars in expenditures, despite all the controls placed on your ability to travel unencumbered, taking off your shoes, having your toothpaste, shampoo, and fingernail clippers confiscated, your personal effects rummaged through, all the no-fly lists – the state completely failed to prevent this attacker from boarding a plane with explosives.

Lesson Two:  The state put you in danger in the first place.

With over 800 military bases in 140 countries around the world; with constant war in the Middle East, invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, constant threats against Iran, destabilization of Pakistan, unconditional support for the evil state of Israel, a proxy war in Somalia…and on and on… the biggest, most powerful empire in the history of the world has its tentacles in everyone’s business around the globe – killing people on their own land, installing and supporting dictatorships, and manipulating their economies to the benefit of corporate interests in the US.

This is what motivates individuals to commit acts of terrorism, and for as long as it continues, terrorist attacks will continue.

Lesson Three:  Individuals take action to protect themselves.

With all the failing of the state to provide protection, individuals took action to protect themselves and those around them.  In this case, several alert passengers and crew acted to subdue the attacker and prevent him from carrying his plan to its ultimate end.

Central planning and control does not work, especially in the case of terrorism.  Individual action is best confronted by dynamic, individual response.  Because of this, airlines are much better suited to handle their own security, as they have an interest in providing safe transportation for their customers.  The state subordinates all actors to itself, and forces them to comply with one-size-fits-all rules that are helpless against terrorism.

Lesson Four:  The state will grow as a result, despite its failure.

Even after a complete and utter failure to protect individuals, the state will grow in its power and control.  More controls will be put in place, and traveling by air will become more onerous and invasive of individual liberty.  Unlike free market solutions that go out of business when they fail, and are replaced by better and more effective solutions, the state always grows when it fails.  It will capitalize on the fear generated by this near-successful terrorist attack.

Lesson Five:  People will continue to look to the state for protection.

With all the evidence clearly pointing to a failure of the state, the people – conditioned through a lifetime of state-run education and state-run media to believe in it as their protector, will ask for more state control to protect them.  The bigger hammer theory will apply, as in, “what we need here is a bigger hammer.”  When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  When the only tool in your personal philosophical toolbox is statism, you’ll believe that you only need more of it to fix every problem you encounter.

The slippery slope gets steeper.

There is an organization called DownsizeDC.org that is sponsoring a “Read the Bills Act.”  This piece of legislation would require that congress actually read a bill before they vote on it.

That’s right – a “law” requiring that “lawmakers” actually read what they’re voting on before they make it “law.”*

Does this sound ridiculous and unnecessary?  I mean, of course they actually read the bills before they vote on them, right?  Actually, no, they don’t.  The so-called PATRIOT act was 315 pages long, and the cockroaches in congress received their copy for review only 15 minutes before the vote.  If you watch Andrew Napolitano’s speech at FFF.org (I’ll start you at part III to hear his bit on the PATRIOT act, but the whole thing is good…) you’ll learn that a judge reviewed the legislation himself, and that it took him two days to do so.

Imperial Senator John Conyers, Jr. (S**-Michigan) said “We don’t really read most of the bills.  Do you know what that would entail if we read every bill that we passed?”

As pawns in government’s game, we’re often told that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  This means that you are responsible to understand the federal register, which grows at the rate of 200 – 600 pages a day (which, if you spent 20 hours a day reading, you could keep up with the legislation passed each year…)  But the “lawmakers” read almost none of it.

OK,  so I’ve made the case for the Read the Bills Act.  Obviously, if the Great Leaders expect us to follow all of this “law,” certainly, they should have to read it first and understand exactly what they are imposing on us.  That seems logical.

In the first chapter of For a New Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard describes utilitarianism as a compromise of principle for the sake of political expediency.  Applied to this scenario, it means that instead of striking at the root of the problem (the idea of government and “lawmakers” creating rules over the rest of us in the first place) we take a pragmatic approach, attempting to force them to actually read bills before they pass them.  It is an approach based on “playing within the rules” to accomplish change.

The Read the Bills Act is an attempt to slow the growth of legislation through legislation.  It will be an absolute failure, of course, but the effort itself is nothing more than begging your masters to lighten the stroke of the whip.

The principled stance is to assert that none of this legislation is valid, and that the institution imposing it on the people is illegitimate.  But that is a radical approach, one that is too “unrealistic” to utilitarians.  A utilitarian accepts the rules of the game, and tries to play within them.  They never win, and we always lose when we buy into their philosophy.

Utilitarianism has never accomplished one thing for liberty.

Liberty has always been the product of a tireless minority, radicals who refuse to accept the status quo of the state and its presumed leaders.  Liberty and the state are incompatible, and humanity will move forward when this contradiction is resolved.  It will not be accomplished by working within the rules of the “system.”

*I use the term “law” in quotation marks because nothing that government does has anything to do with the pure definition of law.  My definition of law comes from Frederic Bastiat’s essay The Law (audio here), which states that the proper role of law is to protect life, liberty, and property.  Anything posing as “law” that not only fails to protect life, liberty, or property, but actually imposes on them, is not law at all, but is an instrument of plunder.  It is man-made legislation that is anti-law.

**S is for Scumbag, “D’s” and “R’s” are irrelevant in the House of Thieves.

In the previous installment, I posited that no one can own 100% of a slave’s labor.  The slave holder must provide for the basic necessities of the slave, including food, shelter, and clothing.  Further, the slave has no incentive to produce to the best of his ability, only to do the minimum he must do to prevent violence against him.

Standard American history is full of pride in the narrative that we escaped the tyranny of the King and established a system of “representative government.”  A common reason for the secession movement of the colonists is often simply represented as “taxation without representation.”

Many readers may be surprised to know that taxation, under the crown, was in the range of 1-3%.  This is what the founding generation rebelled against.

Today, you pay over half of your income to the state in the form of all taxes, federal, state, local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and hidden taxes built in to the products you buy (for example:  Gasoline averages $0.46 / gallon and cigarette taxes average $2.61 per pack as of this writing.)

Over fifty percent of the product of your labor is taken from you by the state.  You are over 50% a slave.

It’s a bit different from chattel slavery, of course.  The slave masters have become much more sophisticated than that.  They have created the illusion of freedom, but have cleverly put you under an increasing level of slavery.

You believe you are free, and you believe you own your property.   But you’re not, and you don’t.

You currently live under a system of millions of laws restricting your freedom.  You don’t know what most of them are.  They say “ignorance of the law is no excuse” but any rational individual would easily see the ridiculousness of this premise.  I’ll guarantee you:  Right now, you are in violation of some law or regulation.  You don’t feel the oppression of the law because government can’t possibly enforce them all universally.  But get in any position in which you’re in opposition to the government, and you’ll quickly find that they’ll have a cornucopia of offenses they can use against you.  You’re guilty.

You may think you own your property because you purchased it through voluntary exchange.  But take a stand against the state, and you’ll soon find that they’ll take it from you if you don’t comply.  Perhaps you have no children, and don’t want to fund government education of other people’s kids.  Or perhaps you home school your kids and don’t have a need for the government’s “services” in education and don’t want to pay them, as you’ll bear that cost yourself.  Try not to pay, and you’ll feel the wrath of the state in full force.  They’ll take your property and put you homeless on the street.  If you don’t agree with a trillion-dollar-a-year military empire, and don’t want to fund the aggression against individuals in countries you know nothing about, try to stop paying the state it’s income tax, and again, you’ll feel its wrath.

Slavery is much more comfortable today if you keep a low profile, go along to get along, obey, and pay over half of what you produce to your masters.  You’ll enjoy the benefits that (what remains of) the free market provides you, while remaining in a state of belief that you’re free, programmed by your 13+ year government education.

If, under chattel slavery, an owner can only acquire 75% of a slaves output capability (a number we estimated loosely in the first part), then you’re only 25% off from that rate of theft in your own form of slavery.  Since chattel slaves have no incentive to produce or innovate, there can be no dynamic economic system, and hence very little wealth produced.  The new slave owners have fostered enough freedom to allow the slaves to create, innovate, produce, and create incredible wealth from which they can extract a massive booty, while disguising their violence behind such anecdotes as “the government (slave owner) is us.”

Government produces nothing.  Everything it has, everything it spends, everything it funds is taken from the productive sector – you.  There is genius and elegance in the way it has positioned itself as the protector of your life, liberty, and property while taking them all from you, and at the same time convincing you that you’re “free.”  Even more genius is the fact that it has convinced you that you’re to blame if it’s not working the way you’d like it to because, after all, the government is “you” and you have a vote.

But let us not give them too much credit.  While the state has been savvy enough to realize that they can have a much larger pool of wealth to extract from by allowing a certain degree of freedom, like any parasite they continue to suck the life blood from the host until they kill it, in the form of increased regulation, more laws destroying individual liberty, and destruction of the currency.  Aesop is destroying the goose to harvest more golden eggs.

To paraphrase W. Edwards Deming, one day future generations will look back upon our era of the state and view it as the age of mythology.  Today’s best thinking is tomorrow’s historical curiosity.  The idea that you protect life, liberty, and property by taking life, crushing liberty, and stealing property will be looked upon as one of man’s greatest errors.

Wake up, accept the fact that you’ve been enslaved, and rid yourself of this fantasy called government.

It appears as though most people don’t know what capitalism is.  A recent worldwide BBC poll finds that only 11% of people across 27 countries believe that capitalism is working well.  People want more government regulation.

What Capitalism is

Capitalism is nothing more than the sum of the individual action of free people engaging in mutually beneficent exchange with one another.  It is a voluntary system, and the wealth that it creates is an emergent property.  Every time you make a choice without coercion, you are engaging in capitalism.

What Capitalism is not

Capitalism is not central planning.  It is not a government/business partnership.  People believe that the economic system of the US is a capitalist system.  It is no such thing.  It is a system of facism, where government planners pick winners and losers.  It is a system where central planners – self-interested individuals – posit to act in the interest of the rest of us.  They don’t act in your interest.  Every action by these planners benefits the few at the expense of everyone else.

If you want to believe that capitalism is represented by the world’s largest economy, then let the term die.  This economy was built on a relatively free system of exchange, but has been continually co-opted by the state.  Karl Marx coined the term “capitalism” in the first place.  It was a derogatory term used to castigate property ownership.

Substitute the word “freedom” instead.

Ask for more central planning, more control over individual action, and you will suffer the consequences.

Scott Horton, the heroic voice of AntiWar Radio on the TSA, the police state, empire, and the pathetic submission of the American people.

This is 17 minutes of Scott at his best.  There is nothing I can say to add to this piece, you have to just listen to it yourself.

Note:  Strong language

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The purpose of this entry and the following will be to view slavery from an economic / individual liberty perspective.  I will make three fundamental propositions in this first analysis:

1)  Self ownership is the most basic form of property.

2)  Slavery cannot exist without the State.

3)  Slavery is economically unfeasible.

These arguments are an extension of the revisionist history perspective that the “Civil War” (better described as the War of Northern Aggression, or the war for Southern Independence) was not about slavery at all, but about the centralization of federal government power.

In slavery, it is posited that a slave master has ownership of an individual, claiming him as property.  To begin this analysis, we must first put forth a clear definition of property.

The most basic form of property is self ownership.  Each individual has ownership of himself.  As a self-owner, the individual also owns his labor.

In the case of slavery, we have one individual claiming property ownership over another individual who has an absolute right to ownership of himself.   We have here a conflict.  If we are to resolve this conflict in ownership, the slave must either assert his freedom and flee or cede some of his rights.   The only way the slave owner can take ownership of the slave is through consent.  In this context, every slave consents to the slave owners claim.  The slave either consents to be a slave, or he is not made one.  It is true that his choice may be slavery or death, but that is still a choice.  There has always been the case of the individual who chose to fight to the death rather than submit to slavery.  As a self-owner, each individual has the right to defend himself, and he may choose to submit rather than defend his right.

By taking “ownership” of a slave, a slaveholder acquires the product of the slaves labor.  But this acquisition of labor is not cost-free.  The slave must be fed, sheltered, and cared for.

In the acquisition of the slave, the slave owner is attempting to gain full control over the labor if the slave.  However, it is not possible for him to acquire 100% of this labor at no cost.  Left alone as a free man, part of the slaves labor would be exchanged for the basic necessities in life:  Food, clothing, and shelter.  Insofar as a slave owner must provide these things, in whatever meager form, he is still assuming these costs.

As an owner of his labor, the slave controls his production.  There is no economic incentive for the slave to produce any more than is necessary to prevent violence against him.  Therefore, a slave will only produce the minimum amount necessary to escape discipline.  There are many documented cases of slaves initiating work slowdowns in the form of feigned illness, sabotage of the tooling used in production, and the like.

In this state of conflict between self-ownership and claimed ownership of one individual over another, there is one fundamental assumption:  The slave would prefer to have more choice regarding the product of his labor.  Ultimately, he would prefer to be free.  The cost of containment is a large burden on the slave owner, he must provide security to prevent the slaves escape.  And if the slave should escape the plantation, the cost increases exponentially in search and recovery.

This is where the State comes in.  As I’ve pointed out dozens of times in different contexts throughout this blog, politically connected individuals seek to socialize their losses and privatize their profits.  Large-scale slave owners were among the wealthiest and most politically connected individuals in that era.  They lobbied the State to socialize the cost of returning slaves to the plantation.  The State obliged through legislation incriminating anyone who would provide safe haven to an escaped slave, and used the resources acquired by theft in the form of taxation to recover them and return them to the plantation.  Those who were opposed to slavery funded the cost of recovery.  Without the State there to provide these “services” and protection from loss, the slave owner faces immense costs in attrition.  The slaves themselves faced a much larger barrier to escape, in that anyone who would provide them with a safe haven would be criminalized, and that no matter where they went, the long arm of the “law” was out to get them.  Remove these barriers, and the incentive to escape increases.

In a true free market economy, absent the force of the State, slave labor cannot compete with free market labor.  In the free market, companies are in competition for good workers.  This competition drives up the cost of labor, and the individual has an incentive to produce at his full capacity to improve his own state of well-being.

Now, let’s go back to the point that a slave owner cannot acquire 100% labor from a slave.  He must absorb the cost of food, clothing, and shelter – as well as medical costs incurred in keeping the slave productive.  If we were to assume that these costs amounted to 25% of the slaves output, and that the slave was only producing an additional 50% of his capability, then it could be stated that the slave himself consented to 75% ownership of his labor.  That makes him 75% a slave, 25% “free” in his own mind, as he’s restricting his output to only that which is necessary to prevent violence against him.

Again, if he consents that the product of 75% of his labor is owned by someone else, he is 75% a slave.

The astute reader may see where I intend to go with Part II of this post.  And it may make him a bit uncomfortable…

Slavery Part II