Outside of moral objections, can anyone refute the claim that societies thrive when slavery is encouraged?

Kill yourself

Knowing you will get beaten into a pulp if you don't do your job is working in your own self interests

>muh feels

no, it's morally wrong

Not self interest for getting work done. Self interest from avoiding getting beat. Major difference

feels is at least in the top 3 maybe strawberry jam is a better album

They used slaves in factories in richmond

Any ways some civilizations like Rome made their fortunes on slavery, others like the norse made their success on the lack of it or serfdom on native populations. No serfdom gave the norse a much higher pool of manpower for armies. Ultimately slavery/serfdom declined when countries shifted towards human capital during the industrialization

With the same end result. The work gets done.

Yes, muh feels. Because muh feels are the only thing that separates me from the animals. Emotions are the only thing humans really excel at.

Animals have emotions you clown. What seperates man from animal is our ability to reason and think, to plan for the future and learn from the past. Not getting sad

Production is higher when workers have actual money as incentive.

Having millions of low skill laborers that you must house and feed is shit compared to low skill laborers you can pay pennies and not have to house and feed.

This

First post best post.

The Romans faced constant social discontent due to slavery taking over the jobs of the Italian peasantry. That social discontent almost brought down the Republic, not to mention that the slaves made a huge mess of Italy and Sicily when they rose in the Servile Wars.

In fact, Augustus's decision to stabilize the borders (therefore not bringing back new slaves every five years or so) really helped domestic unrest in Rome. Slavery almost totally faded out by the 3rd century and the 4th century (some of Rome's strongest years under Diocletian and Constantine).

In fact, the Romans turned down the use of steam engines because of slavery. Slavery really held the Romans down more than it built the Empire. Stop being edgy.

Also the problem with slaves is that you constantly have to pay money to import them, because when you view people as property you tend to go through them quickly and slaves don't really want to breed and have their children have the same life they do.

>Rome
>3rd and 4th century
>"Some of Rome's strongest years"

Are you serious? The empire was practically in free fall during both Diocletia and Constantine's rule - especially when compared to 1st and 2nd century

Well the Imperial Chinese managed to thrive without slavery. Because the Han-period Emperors realized that
1) You have a titanic population anyway and
2) Turns out people work better if you ensured them and their families got something out of their work as opposed to threats of punishment and feudal obligations.
and
3) Oh wow, this works on trade too. Establish a minimum level of protection from government and just proto-laissez faire everything. Look at those greedy merchants go! Earning money for both themselves and the state.

Slavery did exist in China but as a method of punishment, and severely temporary. But it was abolished by numerous dynasties as an economic practice. The Chinese word for peasant actually is "Nongfu" meaning "Rural Laborer," and should give you an idea how non-feudal, non-slavery that is. While the cunt did not work for a wage, he does work in a land owned by his clan-village, where everyone is -literally- his family. Good harvest = family eats + money in the clan coffers for sold crops/cash crops.

>The most common form of slave resistance was what is known as “day-to-day” resistance, or small acts of rebellion. This form of resistance included sabotage, such as breaking tools or setting fire to buildings. Striking out at a slave owner's property was a way to strike at the man himself, albeit indirectly.
>Other methods of day-to-day resistance were feigning illness, playing dumb or slowing down work. Both men and women faked being ill to gain relief from their harsh working conditions. Women may have been able to feign illness more easily—they were expected to provide their owners with children, and at least some owners would have wanted to protect the childbearing capacity of their female slaves. Slaves could also play on their masters' and mistresses' prejudices by seeming to not understand instructions. When possible, slaves could also decrease their pace of work.

afroamhistory.about.com/od/slavery/a/How-Did-Slaves-Resist-Slavery.htm

Enjoy your broken equipment and slow work whenever you're not watching over them directly.

...why do Americans always assume slavery refers to their little adventures? Anyway that sounds like your slaves took the piss because you were too soft on them

>slavery held the Romans back
>one of the worlds greatest empires

The Empire functioned just as well under Constantine as it did under Trajan. It's easy to think of the fall of the Roman Empire as one long free fall from Commodus to Romulus Augustalus, but it was a lot more complicated that that.

But this isn't about 4th century Rome, it's about how slavery generally didn't work.

That's a universal thing for slave estates. Haiti was particularly bad, a lot worse than in the U.S.
>implying the Romans couldn't have accomplished more

Because American slavery was the largest slave economy.

>too soft
>waste more time and resources, instill more resistance and injure the people doing the work

Or... you could just pay them under consensual agreements AKA jobs. I don't even know why you're disagreeing, just a /pol/ nut >hur slavery wuz good I suppose.

I'm disagreeing because the quoted problem would have been easily fixed with harsher discipline. If your nation is going to enslave a load of Africans then there's no point in half-measures when your slaves are acting out. I cannot understand the mentality that thinks enslaving an entire race = great, punishing said race = terrible.

Just because someone has a different opinion to you doesn't give you the right to start throwing out ad homeniums.

>Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was performed to re-assert the dominance of the master (or overseer) over the slave.
>They were punished with knives, guns, field tools and nearby objects. The whip was the most common instrument used against a slave; one said "The only punishment that I ever heard or knew of being administered slaves was whipping", although he knew several who were beaten to death for offenses such as "sassing" a white person, hitting another "negro", "fussing" or fighting in quarters
>Slave overseers were authorized to whip and punish slaves. One overseer told a visitor, "Some Negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case."A former slave describes witnessing females being whipped: "They usually screamed and prayed, though a few never made a sound." If the woman was pregnant, workers might dig a hole for her to rest her belly while being whipped. After slaves were whipped, overseers might order their wounds be burst and rubbed with turpentine and red pepper. An overseer reportly took a brick, ground it into a powder, mixed it with lard and rubbed it all over a slave

>A metal collar was put on a slave to remind him of his wrongdoing. Such collars were thick and heavy; they often had protruding spikes which made fieldwork difficult and prevented the slave from sleeping when lying down. Louis Cain, a former slave, describes seeing another slave punished: "One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him. Then he put a bell on him, in a wooden frame what slip over the shoulders and under the arms. He made that nigger wear the bell a year and took it off on Christmas for a present to him. It sho' did make a good nigger out of him."
>Slaves were punished for a number of reasons: working too slowly, breaking a law (for example, running away), leaving the plantation without permission or insubordination. Myers and Massy describe the practices: "The punishment of deviant slaves was decentralized, based on plantations, and crafted so as not to impede their value as laborers." Whites punished slaves publicly to set an example. A man named Harding describes an incident in which a woman assisted several men in a minor rebellion: "The women he hoisted up by the thumbs, whipp'd and slashed her with knives before the other slaves till she died." Men and women were sometimes punished differently; according to the 1789 report of the Virginia Committee of the Privy Council, males were often shackled but women and girls were left free.
>The branding of slaves for identification was common during the colonial era; however, by the nineteenth century it was used primarily as punishment. Mutilation (such as castration, or amputating ears) was a relatively common punishment during the colonial era and still used in 1830. Any punishment was permitted for runaway slaves, and many bore wounds from shotgun blasts or dog bites used by their captors.

Oh, half-measures? More punishing? Just tell me how exactly.

Executions obviously. Look what Rome did when slaves got pissy

They often did kill slaves when they disobeyed. Great way to kill some high value capital.

>massa took a hot iron and brands him
>it sho' did make a good nigger out of him

It's an investment. Butchering some of your more rebellious slaves is going to strike fear in the remainder and ensure you don't lose more down the line

Why not just have both?

Slaves are not selling their labor to the highest bidder. In this way, society loses a form of organization which would have attracted the most fit workers to the most needed work in localized areas.

An anti-competitive effect of this is that slaves would have no conscious will to "be better" than the other producers in the society. If they had any stake in their produced goods (which can be as simple as being paid), they would have incentives to improve their work using their unique, individual skills.

If slavery brings benefits to the individual businesses, this does not translate to overall increase of the society's economy. Businesses which don't use slaves can't compete well with those which do; the important concept here is that slavery is unlawful by moral standards.

You can take subjective morality out of the picture, but proper/theoretical government is based on the idea that there is an objective morality, which, while it cannot be known to us (like any objective Truth), we can use our creativity to interpret our experiences of attempted approach. You could say government is a technology.

When there is slavery, the businesses that understand the moral/legal implications of slavery cannot compete fairly with those that use slavery. The factor that is preventing them from competing fairly is *not fundamentally* the difficulty in achieving the same low prices for their products. The more fundamental factor is the improper use of force by the slave-users.

This reasoning applies regardless of the actual laws of the society, because regardless of what laws say, we are convinced that slavery is morally incorrect. This is enough to act as an estimation of objective moral truth and consensus on the proper forms of government, as far as concerns our context.

>outside of moral objections
>it's objectively immoral

Mechanisation renders it unnecessary, and expensive.

Its only barely better than just having third world sweatshops, and there are downsides too it.

Its better to just have people trapped living in third world shitholes than it is to have slaves.

He wants our individual morality out of the picture.

I kept individual morality completely out of it.

My argument is not inconsistent with OP's inquiry.

industry output isn't the most important thing for improvement of human society. slavery is a hindrance for everything that is actually helpful.

That never works though.

They did, that's why it was practiced widely. Then, came machines and industrialism, with it's coming ended slavery. The moral aspect is purely commentary.

It doesn't matter

Slavery rots a society. It gives the large and well connected an innate market advantage over their competitors, who can't compete against the guy who doesn't have to make payroll. This drives an ever larger amount of middle class into poverty and destitution, which suppresses aggregate demand to below sustainable levels.

The southern states were the wealthiest in the nation around the time of the American revolution, but where Northern states emancipated their slaves in the 1780's the south clung tenaciously to this heritage, and by the time the civil war broke out the southern states' economies were in shambles, their political clout had diminished to the point of irrelevance, and slave worked cotton being its only real industry to speak of, making a tiny cadre of aristocrats wealthy at the expense of working class and middle class whites.