Look, we would be very happy to give up all our slaves if we had the same conditions you have up there. Because slave ownership is only the optimal economic choice under very specific land-ownership conditions.If you have not very many people on a lot of land, the only way you can get them to work for you is at the point of a gun. Because access to land means self-sufficiency. If, on the other hand, you have a lot of people, and you've got land title all tied up, they have no choice but to work for you for whatever pittance. So, frankly, I'd rather have it like you do, because you don't have to pay for them when they get sick. You don't have to pay for their food when they're infants. You don't have to pay for them in their old age. So, frankly, you can offer them whatever pittance you want, and if they don't take it, you'll hire somebody else.
It made a lot of sense to me. Access to land is everything.
And, by the way, land ownership doesn't exist. I don't own this land here. What actually happens is, my mom owns a piece of paper that we all agree means that she owns this land. But she doesn't own any land, Warehauser doesn't any land. Sierra Pacific doesn't own any land, the US government doesn't own any land. They have pieces of paper that we all agree mean that they own the land. But what there is, is there's land, and there's starving people, and there's people who are paying money to live on land that other people have pieces of paper that say that they own, but it's all a shared hallucination.
Wage slavery is a system in which a person can only subsist by exchanging their labor for money - essentially forcing them to work for others for a living in exchange for means of subsistence.
Taxes, in a democracy at least, are intended to be merely a yearly collection to pay for products/services used in common with a state managed agency typically overseeing the apportionment of those funds.
However, if taxes are extracted through coercive means (as they are in most present-day states), then they can be viewed as coercing individuals into a choice between either wage slavery or poverty. In that way taxes and wage-slavery are two ends a coercive system.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna...
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-i...
Specifically they found that the NGO behind the slavery index had taken some countries where there was no data and simply assumed that country had as much slavery as a similar country (nearby, similar population etc)
Then they ranked countries. And named and shamed.
It was not good statistics.
Simple employer sanctions have proven effective in ending this kind of migration but US gov't imposes almost none.
Heck, even legal professional immigrants (H/L visas) don't have the right to change employers or resign.
If we had credit for all those millions, we'd be at the top of the league table here. Time for a recount. (We're number one.)
Modern slavery involves one person possessing or controlling a person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal.
I would like to know what significantly means. Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived".
- inability to change employers
- inability to travel off site
- inability to make more money than the employer charges for fees/housing/...
- inability to quit
- fear of harm from employer
Similar to the workers in Abu Dhabi
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migra...
You could argue that America has this as a de facto result of real estate speculation. In any given region, real estate has a tendency to inflate until it sops up all excess earnings. Getting "above" real estate is only possible if you can save up a large down payment, etc., and get ahead of it... essentially like how old Roman slaves could purchase their freedom if they could save enough.
The announcement of feudalism's demise was premature.
I also question their definition of slavery. Are US prison inmates forced into labor also slaves?
Slavery is not an easy thing to define.
Your question is still a good one though, and I would be interested to know whether penal labor would qualify as 'slavery', and whether the conditions of the facility, or the reason for incarceration would be taken into account in this judgement.
People also do a good job of rationalizing slavery into something else. The Swiss verdingkinder (child contracting) program existed until into the 1970's and some people still don't believe it was child slavery: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/slaverys-shadow-on...
I'm not sure why you brought that up - that's not controversial.
They include significant to cover cases of bonded labour or trafficked workers. In theory a woman traffiked from one country to another and forced to work as a prostitute is free to go the that country's police forces to report the crime but we know that they don't actually have that freedom.
See also people who are transported to another country and have heir passports taken from them.
Here's a gruesome article about bonded labour in India.
Taken away from their homelands by force to a different continent, using a technology that they couldn't replicate to get back? Forced to work in specific locations, and if they ran away, they were hunted down and brought back? Sold as objects for labour?
Is this a serious question? How much more 'significant' does it need to be before it reaches your theoretical bar? What's the gray area that you see that means they might not be defined as slaves?
Just in case people are wondering where you got that from.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
The TLDR is: they surveyed broadly representative demographics of nine countries on whether any family members had ever been forced to work, and kept in that position by coercion. They also used some secondary sources for ten other countries.
They extrapolated the figures for the rest of the 167 countries based on averages of countries considered to have similar characteristics, with some largely subjective country-specific adjustments.
As an example, the score for China, which they note has few confirmed reports of widespread slavery was (average proportion of slaves in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan).9 + (average proportion of Qatar, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia).1
Worthy as the objective behind the research may be, it's difficult to understate how speculative these estimates and the percentages reported to a ludicrous number of decimal places actually are.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna...
