Meta: Abolitionists and Slaves

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

So, I have a bit of a meta question....

We've seen people like Jeff, Dylan and even the Catholic Church, argue that, given the state of things in the USNA, keeping slaves and treating them well is the right/humane thing to do.

Then there's the argument that keeping slaves at all is wrong, and that it's better to either pay the fines and remove yourself from society (Cate Blanchett is a good example) or to deliberately live poor so that you don't have to own slaves (although we haven't gone into this much yet, David Hewlett's mother and his sister Kate live like this).

I'm kind of curious as to what people here think: which way makes more sense in the context of the AKB verse and which way is more ethical in that same context?

PS: There may be other examples of both sides, I'm kind of behind on the more recent additions to the 'verse.

Comments

[zillah975]

Eventually, a tipping point will be reached where slaves dramatically outnumber free people

Chiming in late. This speaks to something I've been thinking about for a few days, which is that it seems like the existence of corporate slaves would make this a self-perpetuating system. If slave labor weren't cheaper, corporations wouldn't use it; since it's cheaper, they'll prefer it to the exclusion of non-slave labor. It seems like this would create greater and greater unemployment and thus a larger and larger pool of people dropping into poverty and eventually slavery. So what we'll finally have is a system of the very rich and their slaves...except, then, who buys the products that keep the rich rich and the corporations producing?

This may just be a failure of imagination on my part, but it seems like our consumer culture relies on a large middle class with enough disposable income to perpetuate our consumer culture.

Erm.

It's possible that I should go to bed, I'm not sure I'm thinking clearly.