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

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

(and are there multiple lines? so if you have a million you have to own one slave, if you hav five mil you have to own five? or something? or if you're over the line you just have to have one and any others are optional?)

The minimum number of slaves you're required to own is based on a combination of income and location. David and Jason are multi-millionaires, but their minimum is two because they're a household of two in a loft in San Francisco, and not a large family on a sprawling estate in a less urban area.

I've been operating on the assumption that Commerce doesn't worry about oversupply because they haven't come close to meeting demand yet. On one end, corporations who rely on slave labor tend to need lots of people and have high turnover because they simply use people up. On the individual end of the scale, owning slaves is a status symbol. There will always be a market for pretty body-slaves if having at least one is a social necessity and a display of conspicuous consumption.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

So corporations can own slaves too? That makes sense, but I wasn't sure. Do they have a requirement threshold too, or is it just a matter of economic advantage for them so no one's bothered to pass any laws about it?

And it also makes sense that the cost of living where you are, and the size of your property would be factored in. [nod]

If there's more demand than supply, then I think the "good" rich people should definitely be buying slaves as a moral duty. If all the people of conscience bow out by one means or another, then that'll leave just the mid-range folks (like Mr. Neal, and realistically Liam, although he's a little farther up the range than Neal) and the real assholes (like Cruise) owning slaves.

Heck, I could see coalitions of the Good Rich People making some concerted effort to buy up as many pre-pubescent slaves as they could get ahold of, to prevent people like Cruise from getting them. Sort of like people in Texas buying cheap horses at auction just to prevent the meat packers' agents from buying them, turning them into steaks and selling them overseas where horse meat is popular. (With the comparison reflecting the suckitude of the system.)

Angie, who's getting more plot bunnies :P