What’s Wrong with Slavery?
What’s Wrong with Slavery?
by Bill Lockwood
American education is all about excoriating the institution of slavery. If nothing else gets taught, this does. The sins of our forefathers owning black slaves is continuously kept before the eyes of students. This is one reason very little celebration occurs in public schools for our wonderful Constitution or the genius of its crafters. The Millennial Generation is programmed to ask only one thing: “Didn’t the Founders own slaves?”
I dare to ask: What’s wrong with slavery? Very few apparently ponder the definition of slavery. Cutting out the unjust physical oppression whereby one person “beats” another–for that is not in itself by definition slavery—what exactly is slavery?
Definitions include “bondage” or “servitude.” But these are merely synonyms. What is it to be “in bondage” or “servitude?” Closer to the real essence of slavery is “complete ownership or control” of one person by another. The “complete domination” of an individual by another in which the enslaved person “works without pay,” and does “not pursue his/her own life.”
Even more specific is this: “A civil relationship whereby one person has absolute power over another and controls his life, liberty, and property.” In other words, the production or toil of the worker is completely owned by another.
Socialism
Now compare the definition of slavery to that of “socialism.” The latter being a broad category, but generally it is any theory of the government owning the means (labor, capital) of production.
Setting the two definitions beside one another one can see there is little, if any substantive difference. Socialism is slavery at a governmental level. Slavery institutionalized. When Bernie Sanders, therefore, touts socialism as his model, he is piping for slavery. Slavery to the state.
America began down the socialistic route with the administrations of Woodrow Wilson (inauguration of the Federal Reserve System) and FDR (beginnings of The New Deal). For example, FDR’s famous “additions” to the Founding Fathers’ “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship” were “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” These are enshrined upon stone at the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C.
However, see FDR’s sleight of hand. As columnist Charles Scaliger commented, it is “impossible to guarantee freedom from want and freedom from fear without compelling others to provide these goods.” Exactly. The first two freedoms (of speech, of worship) demand government to keep their “hands off.” The latter two demand powerful hands-on to re-distribute the earnings or labor of others. What is this? Slavery. No different than living on a plantation.
Sadly, Republicans too frequently cannot see these clear realities. Promising to keep the welfare state (slavery) alive, one queried me pertaining to illegal immigrants: “What’s the difference in me (government) taking your earnings and giving it to Americans and giving it to illegal aliens?”
Well, aside from citizenship factors, the answer is NOTHING. Nothing, if slavery is to be endorsed. My objection to redistribution of my earnings is not based upon the nationality or identity of the recipients. It is rooted in the immoral conduct of an unchained government that believes it has the power to forcibly rob Peter to pay Paul. Citizen or not.
America is on the point of splitting itself into warring factions right now. But that is in part because our politically-correct American history preaches the debauchery of slavery while the likes of socialist Bernie Sanders and “milquetoast” establishment Republicans endorse slavery—to one degree or another. How long will we go limping between two opinions?