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> Some would probably even prefer being beaten once in a while, than to have no hope of ever getting free of the debt after a decade of trying.
You are missing that slavery means your owner can beat you up and rape you as much as they want and you still have no hope of getting free.
Heck, if you just want to look at the Atlantic slave trade, the United States was _second to last_ among nations in terms of trade volume.
Also Native American slavery in the 1600s and 1700s was pretty huge (relative to the size of European populations) so there wasn't as much demand for African slaves until that "source" was depleted.
e.g. most of Carolinas and the area between Spanish Florida and English colonies up the coast was almost entirely depopulated largely due to slave raids (and at least by then the Spanish and English had a very different attitude towards enslaving natives so British-American colonies were somewhat unique in that respect).
And this extended to the North as well. Supposedly the proportion of households that owned Native American slaves in Rhode Island in the early 1700s was comparable to that in Virginia in the 1860s (of the average number of slaves per household was probably much lower)
A student _loan_ is nothing at all like being a non-person OWNED by someone who can do whatever he/she wants with you, even use you as alligator bait.
Here's from the Jim Crow museum: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2013/may.htm
Enjoy.
:edited my first sentence to clarify it's not quite indentured servitude :)
It is very common in these discussions, and makes it very hard to communicate.
Historically, outside of race/religion/ethnicity based slavery (where slaves were generally kidnapped foreigners/outsiders or their descendants), it was a generally a continuum. Most societies were extremely hierarchical so there were various different tiers of unfree individuals who had different rights (or none at all if you were at the bottom) rather than some extremely clear boundary (like in North America). e.g. chattel slavery coexisted just fine with various types of serfdom in Early medieval Europe.
In many societies even "voluntary" slavery wasn't that uncommon because people were forced to chose between starving to death and giving up their (and usually their descendants) liberty.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-my...
However, to quote you:
> work eight hours a day and go home to play video games, watch tv, and eat delicious food
Many people in this condition in the US work way more than 8 hours a day and have a diet of very low-quality food, especially in rural areas.
Additionally, there’s no hope for the future. A good master at the time meant marriage and children and providing for them was all on the table. Our modern system leaves nothing of the sort on the table for anyone.
This is not slavery nor is it slave-like. You diminish the evils of owning people when you jump on your anti-pay-back-the-money-you-borrowed hobby horse and claim it's slave-like.
Stop reading here.
$50,000 is an outlier for student borrowers. The mean debt for a graduate in 2023 is around $30,000. For someone a decade ago it was 20% less according to a brief search. A person a decade into their career who has $50,000 in debt and is working a minimum wage job needs to take a hard look at their choices. The majority of borrowers have less than $20,000 in loans to pay back.