If you think the cushy white collar jobs most of us HN readers have "mangle and shred your body", try non-mechanized subsistence agriculture for a few years and see how that compares.

And a fish doesn’t recognize water.

Go in the woods, hunt and forage your food.

As long as you have no monetary income and cause no trouble, the people with guns won't persecute you. The people with guns still persecute you? Try another country with a less competent government.

It's not slavery as long as you have this choice - but I don't think you'll like that existence.

You are not a slave to the economy, you are a slave to violence.

Other people with a capacity for violence will hurt you and claim the land where you live. And that's nature.

The economy is just the soft-core version of that - with extra rules.

I mean, I see what you're doing there. But it is more of a fallacy of language to get to accusing me of rationalizing human slavery. So that is a bit crappy.

Again, "the economy" is just supply/demand. "The economy" exists with or without humans. Animals are subject to natural resources around them. A human living "freely" in the forest is subject to it.

What you did in your later lines was fulfill my exact original recommendation to OP -- they are not talking about "slave to the economy", they are talking about "slave to the slave masters who manipulate our economy to a greater extent than we have resources to overcome".

It's all semantics, but phrases like "slave to the economy" come off as something a 13-year-old shouts after seeing a couple pop-psych youtube vids.

Oh, baloney. "Slave of the plantation" is different from "slave of the economy" because one was, you know, literal slavery. And the other isn't.

> If you don't participate in the economy, you die. Not through some physical impossibility, but because the owners and masters will not allow you food, water, shelter, medicine. If they could control air they'd sell that too.

It's not that they won't allow you food, as if they are consciously controlling whether you get a morsel today or not. It's that your food supply is not their responsibility. It's yours. You want food? Go do something to get it.

You know who is responsible for feeding others? Slave owners.

You have that control; they don't. Be glad of that, even if it means you have to go to work.

> If you don't get a job and sacrifice 98% of the income generated by your work to your owner and master, you die.

Not at all. You can work for yourself - start your own business. Most people won't take the risk - or take on the work - to do it. That doesn't make them a slave, though.

And, 98%? Have you seen the profit margins of, say, grocery stores?