> Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
There are no free vegetables from those gardens.