This article was originally published by Joshua Mawhorter at The Mises Institute.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Considering government IS slavery, this shouldn’t be too difficult of a concept to grasp. Anyone with “authority” over is a master, and the one obligated to obey or face punishment is a slave. Mental slavery is still slavery.
Given America’s history with slavery and eventual emancipation, especially the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, the average person might be left with the impression that slavery was only ended thanks to the efforts of a powerful nation-state. In fact, one might even go as far as to assume that slavery could only be brought to an end through government policy and enforcement.
What this misses is the important fact that governments were key enforcers of slavery such that slavery could never have expanded and remained to the extent it did absent government policies and enforcement. In fact, while slavery has sometimes been ended by positive law and enforcement against it, it was largely eradicated by government’s non-enforcement of the slavery system.
Slavery is an ancient institution, common to all cultures. Of course, slavery in multiple forms has existed for millennia of human history. It is true that slavery could, would, and has existed absent the political state, however, the state was necessary to socialize, maintain, and enforce the slave system through the coercive legal apparatus.
Slavery, largely because of its high enforcement costs, was always vulnerable to cronyism. Politically-connected elites, as they often do, sought to privatize their gains and socialize their losses. In other words, how could slaveholders shift the economic burden off of themselves and onto others? The answer is that the only way this could be achieved was through employing the legal and coercive apparatus of government to enforce the system. This benefitted the
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