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> but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.

Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.

So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.

> but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.

A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives.

Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.

> A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically none left because nobody would want one.

[citation needed]

> Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.

I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions.

Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".

The net number of slaves remain equal when your hypothetical slaveowner sells them... At some point somebody will still have to get rid of slavery.

The economic disadvantage of slavery is the same one as that of communism -- people don't work as hard or as smart when they don't receive the fruits of their labor.

So now someone has a factory. They could, in theory, buy slaves and try to get them to work in the factory. But you would run away or, if you stayed, have no desire to work hard because you're not getting paid.

Or, the factory could "buy" slaves and offer them a buy-out mechanism. The factory pays $500, but after you make 1000 widgets, you get your freedom. The factory earns $800 from 1000 widgets, so that's a profitable deal for them. The former slave gets out of slavery as soon as they make 1000 widgets, so they have the incentive to make widgets. Try to get someone to make widgets as a slave without any reward and they only make 500 widgets, and then the factory would have to pay $500 to get $400. So the factory that ultimately frees the slaves out-competes the one that doesn't, and the slaves get freed.

Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century.

True, 250+ years after slavery was abolished in the U.S., slaves are no longer an effective (or legal) asset.

Companies like Apple, Google, etc., did not exist in the 1800s. Stock ownership did not become common until the 1900s, even amongst the wealthy, so there was no alternative for this hypothetical slave owner. Moreover, unlike the North, the South did not have easy access to shipping or to the raw materials for heavy industry. (For example: Pittsburgh didn't become the Steel City because it was a nice place to live; it became the center of the U.S. steel industry because of its proximity to the raw materials and the methods of transportation available at the time.)

>Obvious to whom?

Obvious to the free market. The slave owners were already heading towards bankruptcy when the Civil war began. Nonenforcement of the escaped slaves act could well be seen as a refusal of other participants in the economy to subsidise slave owners' unprofitable business models.

> Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s.

This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census

Good point. I mistyped and changed my comment to say "through". And that shows slavery halving as a % of the population.

So now you're saying that "slavery started to fade away" as soon as it was abolished but it had nothing to do with the actual abolition? Just co-incidence?

And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.

Banning slavery had a big effect. But the ban wouldn't hold if slavery made economic sense. It isn't as though the the people were suddenly imbued with a moral spirit - we've had human history for literal millennia. Slavery being bad for slaves is not a complicated concept, people knew about that forever.

Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.

> Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.

The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...

Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s.

Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves.

The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom.

No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.

Slavery started to fade away around the 1800s.

No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.

> By 2017, 60% of the Libyan population were malnourished. Since then, 1.3 million people are waiting for emergency humanitarian aid, out of a total population of 6.4 million [0]

I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that.

Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.

Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy

Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.

That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.

I can substantiate it with Libya - it had one of the highest GDP per capita in the world for a bit (same wiki page). But they couldn't sustain that because they have the sort of economy where slavery makes sense. The Saudis and Qatarians will be the same when the oil runs out.

An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.

Two points:

1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost.

Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former.

2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making.

Because it naturally leads to:

a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary.

which leads to:

b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth.

I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable?

Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?

No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality. But I think it is also true that slaves (at least as a source of agricultural labor) were becoming economically unviable regardless, due to advances in technology. Mechanized harvesting and other agricultural mechanization was just less expensive than using (and housing, and feeding) people to do the same work.

> No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality.

Just to make sure, I assume this is your opinion of agreement with me? Which I appreciate, even if you weren't GP. It's just that the phrasing makes it sound like a disagreement in reasoning, which if that is the case I would like you to expand on.

But as to your second point, labor hasn't (yet) disappeared due to industrial revolutions, only shifted. What has changed is simply the scale one unit of labor could perform. Slaves would very much still be valuable in the 1800s. If nothing else proven by the fact that still to this day farming jobs are very often imported low-income jobs. I can't reconcile that fact with your reasoning.

It is not flourishing, it is underground and/or illegal in almost every country in the world. Your example of Libya shows just how badly governance has to break down in order for slavery to regain even a shadow of its former importance. The number of people enslaved has gone from substantial portions of humanity to a fringe activity, mostly on the margins of society.

The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me.

To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here?

Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.