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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the author realizes this, but what he is really doing is pointing out that sometimes slavery can be beneficial for slaves.

Selling your future output net of cost-of-living is essentially what slavery is, after all; and the argument the author is making -- that if one could buy someone's future output (or the future output of a group of people) then one would have an incentive to invest in education and health care and other services which would maximize that output -- is one which dates back to at least the Roman republic, and probably earlier: Roman slaveowners would often pay to have their slaves educated or trained, because it increased the slaves' value more than the education or training cost.

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Public companies can always spend cash on buying back stock so they can go private again.

Of course it can be beneficial to slaves. If they're an asset, and the appreciation in that asset's value accrues mostly to the owner, that owner has every incentive to maximize their value.

As Mencius Moldbug (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...) points out, one modern version of this is the Japanese lifetime employment system. If a company pays 2% on money it borrows, and gets to keep employees for twenty years or more, it can afford to spend years training them without getting any revenue from their work.

sounds more like indentured service

It's not slavery if one is willing to be enslaved.

I downvoted because I believe that slavery can be created as a best alternative. Imagine if someone said to a starving person, "If you become a slave you'll have food every day."

That person may become a slave by choice, but only at the loss of freedom. Because the negative ramifications of slavery are not presented to the potential slave, they are making a choice with limited information.

"Its not stealing if you don't get caught" bullshit!

More like "it's not rape if they consent".

Arguably it would be slavery if they agreed at first and then decided they wanted out, but the statement is not obviously bullshit.

There's a reason that freedom is usually held to be an 'inalienable right' (one that can't be sold). Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

That is simply untrue. We sell our freedoms all the time. I sell big chunks of mine in two-week increments when I work; I sell my freedom for other times when I go home to an apartment where there are certain limits on my behavior.

There is an implicit quantifier in the phrase 'sell their freedom'. You read 'any', I meant 'all'.

Right. If you're okay with selling it in increments, but not selling all of it, there's probably a cutoff. And your cutoff is probably lower than 99%.

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