At first this may be entirely analogous but I’d like to here what everyone’s thoughts are on it.
A slave owner is a microeconomic version of the state. The slave is a microeconomic person of a citizen.
At the macro level, government officials are the slaveowners, and we are their serfs.
This is assuming the slave never agreed to be employed by the slave owner, similarly as citizen’s never agree to being serfs under the state.
Is that a fair comparison?
Yes, it makes perfect sense and I completely agree, but it’s not an original idea unfortunately.
I often use this comparison and many people before me have as well.
Cool well it’s no biggy if it’s not original, though I’m kinda proud I thought of it. More importantly I don’t want to make a fool of myself if I ever use it.
Yeah OK, but what are some of the lessons we can draw from comparing the two? Eg what does slavery feed on, what were the effective strategies for resistance? To what extent are they transferable onto the modern state?
The comparison is spot on I’d say. If you really want to be cynical you can conclude that since everyone is a slave to the state, this includes a slave owner. In which case its entirely possible to be a slave and a slave owner concurrently; which is a bit paradoxical. Hmm. As for lessons that we can take from it.. a slave does tend to try escaping if he believes that he can do so with a reasonable amount of success. Perhaps we should take this to mean that the best strategy is to run away from our slave owners (the state) and go live elsewhere? I hear the Martians are quite respectful of property rights.
Another comparison however is how some Slaves may come to adore their slave owner and their way of life. Ignorance can be blissful afterall. This by comparison would be someone addicted to the welfare state and due to public education ect.. they never got the opportunity to live differently.
Slavery, and serfdom as well, requires a legal monopoly in order to sustain itself. If the slaves can simply leave your estate and get paid wages on the next guy’s, there is no way you are going to have the power to get them back. You need to have power over the next guy and force him to surrender the slaves, or at least forbid him from using their labor without paying you.
For this reason the medieval era was characterized by conflicts between feudal lords and cities. Cities wanted to be exempt from taxes, and so serfs who left the estate of their lords could move there and take up a free trade. This impoverished the lords, who had to pay a bigger share to their tenants to hold them in place. They sought to destroy cities or subject them to taxation.
The way you can tell that any population is being enserfed in a country is if the capital markets are being taken over by the central power. This makes it impossible for capital owners to compete for labor.
Interesting. I likes
http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs128.html
Bob Higgs on “Why We Couldn’t Abolish Slavery Then and Can’t Abolish Government Now”
Thanks. A valuable link.
That comparison is completely fair, and one that has been come to before by other libertarian/anarchist thinkers. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_slavery
That’s eerie, because just yesterday I was thinking the exact same thing. And after a half-hour session I got to some very interesting results. I’m afraid that yours is not “just an argument against the state”, but has some very deep implication that might explain a lot of things. Very worth analyzing ( I myself surely will).