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Comment by sofal | Hacker News Reader

Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest discussion.

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I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently, before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...

Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.

You just argued that slavery wasn't that bad. In your opinion slaves were treated quite well because they had some monetary value, which is simply not true. You rewrite history in favor of slavery and then you accuse me of being dishonest? Not even fascists nowadays support slavery. This is more than disturbing. I simply can't believe how you can actually support slavery while the US has an African American president.

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