Liberty and Slavery

“By liberty is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments; which impediments may oft take away part of a man's power to do what he would, but cannot hinder him from using the power left him according as his judgement and reason shall dictate to him. “ Hobbes “Leviathan”

Everybody knows that the US is about individual Liberty. What does that mean? What is Liberty? Is Liberty the right to rape and murder the girl next door? Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle maintained that excesses of liberty would eventually destroy most democracies. In their time there was no terminology for distinguishing between a healthy democracy and mob rule. There was also no terminology for distinguishing between the healthy exercise of liberty and the excesses of liberty. In Cicero’s De Re Publica he distinguishes between democracy and mob rule naming mob rule ochlocracy. It is a useful term. Similarly language has evolved a word for the excesses of liberty, they are called license. This is a clever word for the purpose. You need a license to do the things that are not Natural Rights, but you need no license to exercise your rights. In the excesses of liberty, citizens behave as though they had a license to violate the rights of others. Kind of like James Bond’s license to kill.

The most likely right for an ochlocracy to violate is the right to property. It is generally violated by taxing the wealthy to give to the poor. This brings us naturally to slavery. Slavery is generally defended as a form of property. The Southerners looked upon the anti-slavery movement as an attempt to give the government the right to tax and confiscate property without limit. As they saw slaves as property they felt that if the government could just arbitrarily take their slaves away, they could confiscate any kind of property at all. They considered it a renunciation of all that had been won in the Revolutionary War. There is historically a tension between the right to property and the right to liberty. In many cases, property rights are the means of making people slaves. Generally you think of conquered people being marched off to the slave market, but much of the slavery in history and in the modern world today is or was called indentured servitude. Money, banking, and debt systems are written in such a way that no one can pay their debts. They are then sold as slaves to pay their debts, or they are put to work without pay until their debts are paid, but since they are charged for food, lodging, clothing, etc. they can never work their way to freedom. Recent ‘reforms’ of the bankruptcy laws passed by the Republicans are threateningly reminiscent of such systems.

Too strong a commitment to the Right to Property goes hand in hand with the legalization of Slavery in a society. License is the violation of one persons rights by another. Property is frequently used as a license to destroy Liberty. Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations” wrote, “In every country where the unfortunate law of slavery is established, the magistrate, when he protects the slave, intermeddles in some measure in the management of the private property of the master; and, in a free country, where the master is perhaps either a member of the colony assembly, or an elector of such a member, he dare not do this but with the greatest caution and circumspection.”

What is the result? Does rendering a person a Slave, removing their Liberty violate Natural Law and Natural Rights. For a right to be a Natural Right it must also be necessary. It must injure society if society allows it to be violated. It must also violate human nature.

In the discussion of the Right to Property and Hospitality it was determined that a fundamental need of human nature was for there to be a relationship between work and reward. Slavery destroys this. A Slave has no incentive to work because he receives nothing for his labor. The fruits of his labor belong to his master. This is a clear violation of the exact same principle of human nature which creates the Right to Property and which is the cause and support of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Obviously slavery is a grotesque violation of Natural Law.

A slave is thus unmotivated to work. The Greeks used to say that making a man a slave made him half a man. William Cheek wrote a book titled “Black Resistance Before the Civil War”. In it he details the different ways in which Blacks resisted their Masters. Under deception he describes many kinds of sabotage which Blacks employed making their labor not just inefficient but downright costly. Blacks abused the draft animals so that horses could not be used only mules could stand the harsh treatment. They broke the tools they were issued unless they were made in such a strong fashion that they could not be broken. This made them heavy, cumbersome and inefficient. They stole regularly. (Aptheker in his book “American Negro Slave Revolts” notes that Blacks clearly knew the difference between stealing which was theft from a fellow Slave, and ‘taking’ which was the legitimate appropriation of property from the Master.) They lied all the time to make work slow or impossible. They injured themselves so that they could not work. All of this together made slavery the most inefficient and non-productive form of labor possible. Slavery injures society by rendering that entire portion of the population which are slaves less productive than they would have been if laboring in their own interest. Thus reducing the total wealth produced by society as a whole. In this sense there is a near perfect analogy between slavery as an economic disease and hoof and mouth disease in cattle. Hoof and mouth disease does not kill, it simply reduces the production of the herd to a subsistence level. Slavery does the same for the entire segment of the population reduced to it. They produce no more than they can be forced to, and thus production fails to reach the levels that free motivated workers manage.

Slavery injures the economy of a nation by rendering it less flexible and less capable of adapting to economic stresses. Slaves are expensive. They are so expensive to raise that in Greece their children were always exposed to die rather than go to the expense of raising them. In Louisiana the plantation owners would hire Cajuns to work in the swamps. Slaves were too expensive to risk around alligators. They represent a major capital investment. If the business they are employed in has economic difficulties they are too expensive to keep, but they cannot be disposed of without major economic loss. Salaried employees can just be laid off. Slaves must be sold in order to regain the capital investment they represent. If the entire industry or economy is slow there is no market and they become a serious cost and financial liability to their owners. The slave owners in the South were frequently in desperate financial troubles because of this.

At the time of the Constitutional Congress this financial problem was so real that men like Madison had a real hope that slavery would die of it’s own economic troubles. In Ancient Greece merchants in Athens found it to be more profitable to free their slaves and let them live on the public dole when times were slow and then rehire them as salaried workers when times picked up. The Southern States, knowing history, made this illegal and forced the Plantation Owners to pay their slaves upkeep, refusing to allow them to free slaves and increase the cost of public charity. When slaves were cheap because of Roman conquests, Roman nobles found them cost effective labor. When the borders of the Empire stabilized and the cost of slaves rose Roman Nobles found tenant farmers and free men more cost effective. Slavery consistently fails as a source of labor over time.

Slavery injures the economy of a nation by removing that percentage of the population who are slaves from the market for manufactured goods. This decreases the size of the market, and the volume of money flow, removing stimulus for increased production and manufacture and invention of new goods. This greatly decreases or destroys the process of creation of wealth, it has an even more severe effect upon the creation of new forms of wealth. Failure to provide a livable minimum wage has a similar effect.

Slavery provides the illusion of inexpensive labor. This removes most powerful single incentive to improve the efficiency of the means of production in order to cut labor costs. To quote Adam Smith,

This also works to prevent the creation of new wealth. High labor costs inspire management to increase the efficiency of each laborer by improving tools and methods and this causes the creation of new wealth through increased productive efficiency. Another good reason that minimum wage laws provide an economic stimulus.

Competition will drive profits down to that minimum necessary to stay in business largely independent of labor costs. If one persons uses slaves and another person uses slaves then there is no savings in labor costs. Competition will still drive the profits of their business down to exactly what it would have been if the labor was paid a livable wage. Within limit’s the cost of labor is an illusion. The market will keep a companies profits at the same level regardless of labor cost. In a market economy, the most productive labor not the cheapest is the best. Slave labor is the least productive form of labor in history. A labor force with money to spend buys the products of other companies, creating a labor force there with money to spend which buys the products of the first business. In a market economy the higher the sustainable minimum wage, the richer everyone is.

Slavery is one of the most inefficient economic institutions in the history of the world. It tends to keep any society which relies on it relatively backward, undeveloped and poor. Economically it is a great evil.

Slavery is a violation of Natural Rights and Natural Law. It varies in degree and severity. Adam Smith notes,

As Adam Smith noted in the quote above the less severe the treatment of slaves the closer they are to hired servants the more efficient they become. The Ancient Greek word for hired worker meant wage slave. They considered only those who owned their own business or land or other source of wealth to be truly free. There is a continuum from slavery to indentured servant to wage slave to free man or citizen. Frequently there is also a sophistical word game in which what is called slavery is closer to free man, and what is called wages or indentured servitude is really slavery. There is an old African saying, “Poverty is Slavery” John Locke says the same thing in a paragraph or two in his “Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay“.

Since this kind of word game is common it would be useful to actually describe what the differences are between these conditions. These definitions are in accord with the degree to which work is tied to reward, not traditional usage. A slave is an unpaid laborer who has no hope of earning his freedom through his labor and is subject to punishment especially corporal punishment as the only means that his master or employer has of motivating his labor. An indentured servant is an unpaid or poorly paid laborer who has a real hope of earning his freedom through his labor and may be subject to corporal punishment to motivate his labor. A wage earner is a laborer who works at a job for his wages and has the ability to quit and seek work elsewhere and is motivated by the desire for wages and the fear of losing his wages. A free man or Citizen is a man who has sufficient control over the means of production of his income that he is motivated to seek methods of improving those means in the hope of personal profit.

At each station in this continuum two things remain in proportion to each other, the degree of correlation between work and reward and the degree to which the person involved will be subject to Adam Smiths invisible hand and actively and creatively work to produce wealth. Only free men or Citizens can fulfill their economic potential and contribute their full potential to the society in which they work. To the degree that wage earners approach the conditions of Citizens with respect to their work situation they become more efficient and productive, to the degree they depart from it they become less efficient and productive. They also become lower in morale because of frustration in satisfaction of the needs that occur later or higher in Maslow’s list of human needs.

In addition to the working conditions, the leisure conditions of a labor force may contribute to the ability of a society to create new wealth. A labor force which has sufficient leisure time to engage in hobbies and sufficient money to finance those hobbies will have a % of persons who attempt to create personal fortunes through invention, or who create inventions from the love of their avocations. Subsistence labor cannot do this. Working 80 hours a week just to achieve food and shelter without any discretionary income to spend on hobbies and avocations makes private invention impossible for all such persons.

In this context it is useful to mention a factoid from “The Bell Curve” which is never mentioned. One of the reasons that it is never mentioned is that apparently 99% of all discussion of what “The Bell Curve” says, pro and con alike, is done by people who have never read the book. While it is true that like many modern academic and political works, probably including everything ever written by Al Gore, “The Bell Curve” deserves to be classed in Science Fiction rather than fact or science in our Public Libraries, like most such attempts to pass ideology off as fact it includes a large body of references to actual scientific studies.

In chapters 4, 5, and 6, it discusses family and social problems associated with IQ. It notes in all instances that the top 1% of IQ in these studies showed the same problems in these areas as the bottom 20%. This is an observation that comes as no surprise to members of Hi IQ societies limited to the top 1% or above. Such social misfits do not tend to fit into the academic intellectual and economic elite which “The Bell Curve” postulates as developing in our society.

They tend to fight with and challenge teachers who resent their intelligence, they get low grades, they have minor scrapes with authority and the law. They tend to end up in jobs people do not commonly associate with geniuses. The same kind of jobs that other social misfits get. When these jobs provide leisure time and pay sufficient to allow such persons to follow their avocations, they can do so. There are 280 million people in the US. That means that there are 2.8 million people in the top 1%. If only 10% of those fall into this category, you have 280 thousand eccentric geniuses following their individual dreams. As the nonconformist, radical, rebellious, outside the box, fraction of the top 1% of IQ in the country, they represent a tremendous think tank operating without government interference. It is possibly more likely that such men will invent the “Next Big Thing” than men of similar intellect but more socially conformist in their thinking. As inventors trying to strike it rich they are a tremendous resource in our country. On the other hand, if forced to work for starvation wages in desperate conditions, they become the idea men and think tank for social revolution and upheaval.

The larger the percentage of the labor force which has sufficient leisure time and discretionary income to indulge in creative hobbies and avocations the more spontaneous creation of new forms of wealth will occur. Steven Jobs and Apple Computers exemplify this American tradition in recent times. Aristotle noted the necessity of leisure for the Citizen class around 350 BC in his “Politics”,

These things being taken into account, the policy of good government should be to attempt to raise the % of its Citizens who are Citizens according to this classification to the highest possible level. The classical solution to this problem is to give the Citizens grants of lands either by the redistribution of land, the distribution of newly conquered lands, or the establishment of colonies. This creates a Citizen Class in which each member owns the means of his own sustenance and financial support. Since it is his, he is as strongly motivated as it is possible to achieve, to improve it as much as possible. This was considered the ideal citizenry in classical times. Aristotle in his Politics called an Agricultural society the best possible basis for a Democracy.

Today it is both impossible and impractical to give everyone grants of land. This was done effectively through the existence of the Frontier for the first century or so of this nations existence. The frontier has been absorbed and the process of concentration of wealth has concentrated the citizens in the cities. There they have learned other ways of living and would find the discipline of farming difficult and unpleasant to acquire.

It is necessary to investigate other means of promoting the attitude of a Citizen in his work. Modern management attempts and generally fails to accomplish this to one degree or another. Suggestion boxes with bonuses for suggestions that save the company money or make it more efficient and productive is one means. Equally important is supplying the higher needs in Maslow’s list. Discussing the reasons for doing things stimulates workers to work harder. Recognition for good performance, hope for merit-based promotion helps.

Despite all the studies and good efforts, Dilbert remains a popular reflection of the modern office environment.

It is natural for the able to acquire wealth that makes the less able become employees instead of masters of their own companies, businesses, or farms. It is unfortunately natural for the owners of such large businesses to look upon the employees as inferior, or even as an enemy. This leads to various problems. Even employers who have the ability to inspire their subordinates may misuse such an ability as in the case of Enron.

Once this situation occurs the state must act as an umpire between the two sides. It must seek to aid businesses which promote the Citizen attitudes towards their work successfully. Not difficult to do, as those businesses will be the most effective and productive. It must seek to prevent the oppression of the employees by their employer.

On the other hand it must be aware that employees act in their own short term interests just as employers do and neither act with respect towards their or the states long term interests. The employees will attempt through unions to divorce pay and reward from merit and work thus guaranteeing pay and reward independent of merit and work.

The worst mistake the state can make is to assume that either side in this conflict will ever be consistently right or ever be fair in its rhetoric.

Still, maintaining a maximum of Liberty and preventing employment from becoming a form of slavery is a strongly prescriptive necessity for the health of the State.

To quote Aristotle in his Ethics, possibly his most famous general principal, “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme.”

The rational principle here is that motivated people work harder than unmotivated people. The extremes are removing this motivation by providing human needs without work via ochlocracy (extreme liberty) or removing this motivation by forcing work without any opportunity to satisfy Maslow’s higher needs (extreme property rights) creating what is essentially slavery regardless of what word is used to name it.. The middle ground lies in maximizing good management in labor forces and striving to build a Citizen class which has the opportunity through personal ownership of business or sufficient income and leisure to create new wealth.