Modern slavery

What about slaves for service based jobs?

>implying paying $8/h in USA isn't slavery
>implying Walmart doesn't do that

If a job is braindead and just involves the repetition of basic tasks then you should get a robot. If it isn't then it's probably too hard for a slave.

To what end? You can beat and scare them into doing things, sure, but as long as their are free people willing to work the job it will be cheaper to hire them.

Yes, you essentially pay for the well being of an employee as you would a slave BUT you are much less liable for a free man. If a slave breaks his leg while not at work you still have to pay for it vs a free man has to figure out how to deal with it on his own.

Free men choose to leave or ask for a wage increase when they feel their labor is not being bought at market value. Slaves just shut down and become shitty workers.

Why pay more or worse out put? Slaves only make sense for large-scale, pre-industrial farming or for sex.

If people or robots can do it at higher quality and cheaper, why not do that?

>Slaves just shut down and become shitty workers.
This shit right here is important.

Who knows how many Allied and Soviet soldiers have survived Axis bombardments because the Axis relied on slave labour to make their munitions?

There are plenty of historical cases of soldiers getting a direct hit from German artillery only for it to turn out to be a dud.

Labor is a product and follows the laws of supply and demand.

By limiting the amount of labor supply we have we can increase the value of labor.

Kick out illegals in the major cities and you will lose a LOT of people who are "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" and force the employers to offer higher wages. Suddenly Americans want to pick up animal shit barehanded for $16-25/hr.

This was inevitably going to get political, but hopefully it can be the good, worldbuildy kind of political.

The west swings to the far-right, immigration controls mandate a period of 'economic contribution' (or something with a similarly harmless name). Any unskilled immigrants and asylum seekers become legal property of a company, with the proportions assigned to each based on a contribution system, this arrangement lasts for a number of years at which point they are granted citizenship.

In the meantime, they're treated purely as property, maybe bring some pre-civil-rights style shit into the mix and say that because they're not legally human they dont legally qualify for human rights etc etc.

Just have fun with it.

Something like fourty percent of the world's shrimp supply comes from workers that are pressed into service and not paid. In the Philippines, if I'm remembering right.
Human trafficking for sex slavery still happens.

>The west swings to the far-right
Follow that through with a complete disregard for the environment, climate change accelerating at an insane rate, damages of tropical storms and tornados rising each year, coastal cities slowly getting swallowed by the sea...

All this coalesces into a big ball of economic you-are-fucking-fucked-dude, which pushes society to become even more extreme and extreme and extreme in order to stay profitable in the wake of apocalyptic natural havoc.

Part of the reason it's cheaper to pay people is that you don't actually have to pay as much as it would cost to feed/clothe/house them. Corps. rely on the government to subsidize their labor at the lowest levels, and by leaving the min wage so far below the poverty line the government encourages this behavior. Between inelastic demand for income and drastically limited collective bargaining power there's little pressure labor can exert on the labor market at these levels.

You could get something slavery-like (as serfdom, sharecropping are) by raising the minimum wage, cutting the social safety net, and generally making non-money protections more valuable than a wage for workers. So maybe this is way past peak oil and people want to live in walking distance to work again. Your McDonalds has apartments overhead and offers that shit in lieu of wages. Maybe there's plague and the only form of insurance available is through employers. Maybe you're on a task system and can utilize the employer's capital to care for yourself once you get all your shit done.

Second problem is how ownership would apply. With a slave, you've got to both invest capital to obtain the guy and take care of his needs. With bots/employees it's an either/or deal. Machine maintenance isn't cost of living, and HR costs from employee turnover aren't buying a slave/robot. On slaves entering the market, you've got people selling themselves in to cover the cost of something (immigration/citizenship, education, legal fees after crimes, whatever) or you've got people selling each other (not always for reasons so essential - people might sell kids to cover gambling debt) or you've got state or business actors taking people by force (usually not just off the street unless you're at the docks). On employers wanting to buy slaves... that's probably the stickiest point to build around. There might be legal rights they're after (for example, being compensated if you die or flee) or something.

Make it something that is demanded by the workers instead of the capitalists.

As technology will take away more and more of the old types of jobs, populism focuses more and more on corporations "doing their duty" and creating "make-work" jobs. As more and more of the populace moves into fewer cities, demands come that the employer's house them

Corporations then, are suddenly looking at a bunch of laws that in effect FORCE them to give people lifetime contracts, force them to give people housing, force them to take care of them and force them to have their own police services...

Basically, the notion is so retarded economically that unless you make it something the plebes asked for, it's not believeable.

Personally, I'd only do it for a ERP and have all the slaves be naked hotties.

It's called Socialism, OP.

Slavery: Work for the master, get paid in food, housing and medical care instead of money.

Socialism: Get taxed for the government, get paid in food, housing and medical care instead of 80% of your money.

Lazy.

Any political system can be framed as slavery.

>Corps. rely on the government to subsidize their labor at the lowest levels, and by leaving the min wage so far below the poverty line the government encourages this behavior.

Eliminate welfare, eliminate minimum wage.

Capitalism: You work and make profit off your work.

Socialism/Communism/Marxism et al: You work and someone takes your money and decides how best to spend it for you.

>Capitalism: You work hard and get only 5% of the profit your work has made.

Fixed it for you, you retarded /pol/ fag.

Odd how that's happening in America, isn't it?

Hey look kids, it's an assblasted marxist!

This.

I can literally just tap a well, create activated charcoal, and manufacture containers and sell filtered water.

It's when the state gets involved and says I can't tap wells or I have to pay a portion of my efforts to the sate (to fund things like telling me not to tap wells) does it become slavery.

see
or you know just see the nearest socialist hellhole referred to as a state run by "democrats"

RIP thread, already derailed by /pol/ posters.

Keep it on topic, or get banned.

>posts off topic crying because he's been blown the fuck out by basic economics and the self-evident slavery of marxist policies

Keep it on topic, or get banned.

I don't need to do anything.
>There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0309/feature1/

WITNESSED!

Full-on post-apocalyptica like the Max Max films or just-before-society-collapses stuff like The Road Warrior works.

Do you know what a workhouse is, user?

When you exchange goods and services for determined goods and services you have lost all freedom.

When I can use currency as an abstraction of my labor and goods sold I have freedom to choose where to invest my energy instead of it being alloted for me.

The real horror is that my labor is time and when somebody else tells me how my time is to be spent (i.e. in exchange for specific forms of healthcare or housing or food assistance) I become a slave as MY time is no longer being spent according to me.

Taxes are like the gas siphon to your life-car.

>There were slavers and de facto slavers who also took all the money they got from slaving and used it to engage in capitalism so capitalism is slavery too just like marxism

How do you feel about roads?

Inelastic demand. Eliminate both and wages hemorrhage even further.

Personally I'd rather a basic income than a minimum wage, but min wage does protect workers and build a consumer market. It also doesn't usually drive up the cost of consumer goods disproportionately to the growth in purchasing power until you hit 50% of the median income.

I own a paving company and I sell my services to private companies and individuals to build roads so pretty good, honestly.

>there was a libertarian utopia of unregulated free market
>people used the desperate as cheap labour

Reality isn't fair, it takes money to make money. You can only benefit from the advantages of free market if you've got a basic standard with which to invest.

And how many private individuals pay for communal, high-traffic roads in your expert opinion?

I was speaking with a tad bit of hyperbole.

There is a certain amount of freedom one must be willing to sacrifice for comforts like roads and zoos and shit but most of those are put up as levies to the voters so really they get to decide if it gets the money.

A fairer way would be to have itemized tax returns to allocate money earned in the coming year based on percentages and previous year's earnings. This maximizes citizen participation in the daily operations of the state.

All of the ones who work, even if they never use said roads, because otherwise they'll be arrested by the socialist government for not allowing themselves to be robbed via taxation.

>I own a paving company and I sell my services to private companies and individuals to build roads so pretty good, honestly.

Well played good sir.

Slavery is more common and widespread now than at any point in human history.

And how would these roads be paid for and maintained otherwise, roadanon?

How does it protect workers?

I have a fat stack of applications at my FLGS and most of them say they will work less than 20 hours a week at $5/hr but I legally cannot pay them less than $9, but I can't afford the $9/hr.

If people elect to undercut each other that's their issue, this is actually partially why unions were formed, to create labor trusts to set wage costs.

>How would you guys go about making, a modern day-20 years from now, setting where slavery is common place practice all around the developed world?

Glad you asked!

The most important thing is to make sure your future slaves are utterly devoid of cultural heritage, common language, religion, ethnicity, or anything that will help them unite. There will always be some stragglers who cling to things such as "religion" or "heritage" like the little silly billies they are, but you can kill them easily enough. When you've suitably mixed together enough peoples, you can easily set them against one another. Use your media apparatus to do this by spreading stories about how a white slave hurt a black slave or how a brown slave hit another brown slave with a different religion.

The next important thing is to craft a managerial class. These are your priests, who will dispense new teachings to your slaves via television to keep them quiet. Make sure your priests are sycophantic, striving against one another for pointless positions and honors while never holding any true power. Best to use women or effeminate men for these, as they are more servile and cowardly.

Ah, but here is the interesting part: money. You need to set up a system in which your slave citizenry is utterly compelled to work. The first component is utterly worthless fiat currency. You cannot let your slaves get their hands on actual silver and gold (something that would give them power), so you lock it up in your vault and give them scraps of paper as an IOU, but you keep pumping out these scraps of paper to constantly reduce their value (what we call "inflation") and encourage your slaves to spend it quickly. But that's still not enough by itself. You need to tax them and compel them to take up debts, mortgages, loans, and use credit to buy worthless trinkets.

There's more to it, but that's the general idea.

>itemized tax returns
Like letting people opt out of paying for individual programs? Not only would people just opt out of everything to save money, this would inflate the administrative costs of the system (which again, everyone would just opt out of).

I wasn't happy paying to fuck around in Iraq, mind, but this would be bonkers.

>russia

Kek. Reminds me of a buddy of mine who wants to get out of Russia before the local mafia goons find out he knows his way around computers, and debt-enslave him into cybercriminality.

This: They're literally doing that in my home country. The terms translate to "rehabilitating work action" and "trial employment", but in practice both mean that a company can get the government to send unemployed people to work for them for free. The former is directed to long-term unemployed, with the idea in theory being that working in some sweatshop with no pay would be "activating" and "therapeutic", while the latter is on paper designed to let a company see if the unemployed person is fit for the position before they actually hire him, but in practice there's no reason for the company to actually ever hire a person when they can after the trial period is over get another unemployed to do the same job for free.

5% of the profit is still bigger than 0% of it.

I dunno, but in most states essential services like power and water are provided without government parasites being directly involved. It's almost as if some company invests money and takes a risk and then makes a profit by charging people to use the services they provide.

Crazy, I know.

Yeah, you get what you pay for nigger.

If people don't want to pay for it, it won't happen. Like how any sane society should work.

Dumb people will take the savinga and throw it to the wind, smart people will take their savings and invest.

Retards lose, smart people win. Great society.

This is one of many reasons I'd prefer a basic income totally in lieu of a min wage.

I work at a comic shop myself, but the bigger issue is usually rent and low turnaround. In a city, rent fucks you. Too far outside a city and you have no customers. Mine got by via buying the property while it was still cheap, and works more like a traditional shop than anybody in the city limits. Besides us everybody within the city is going the gaming cafe route because food pays the business's rent better. For that matter their employees also make more money. I'm where I am mostly because my other job is right next door.

So what you are saying is that business models need to adapt to stay viable? Gee that's insane bro you've really blown my mind.

>large numbers of people can't afford basic necessities
>there is no state
>elites will survive this because they have stuff
Crabs in a barrel.

>in practice there's no reason for the company to actually ever hire a person when they can after the trial period is over get another unemployed to do the same job for free

That is utterly fucked.

>/pol/ need not apply.
How was this supposed to keep /pol/ out?
If anything, it's a giant "Please come in /pol/, we have some hot tea and niggers for you to lynch."

Favoring the occasional regulation to deal with edge cases doesn't mean a guy's anti-market. Whoda thunk.

>mass starvation
>elites die off because there aren't enough people left to support society
>humanity goes extinct

Finally. Took some time, but finally all the bullshit is over. Peace on Earth, everlasting peace on Earth.

/pol/ retards can only think in absolute dualities.

Why would anybody work?

Why would I open my business to begin with if I could make a basic wage that I can live on? Would I, as a business owner, be taxed to fund the basic income program? If I am taxed for it, are larger businesses proportionally taxed? If basic income is higher than the wage I offer to pay people how do I get new employees? How do I benefit from paying people I do not receive labor from?

>why would anybody work

Because living on a minimum sum of money in the minimum sized house you can get off the cheapest food you can get sucks. People aspire to do shit and to have shit.

>>elites die off because there aren't enough people left to support society

Why the fuck do you think they're trying to build robots?

Once things are sufficiently automated, you can bet your hairy neckbeard ass that you and I are going to die of whatever strain of smallpox they release into the air to thin the herd.

But don't you see? If you give all the neets free money then then neets will get free money! That'll fix everything!

>Personally, I'd only do it for a ERP and have all the slaves be naked hotties.
>"Alright Candy, you see this room full of dildos? Your 'job' will be to 'test' every one of them. Should you fail to utilize all of them before Period Two begins you will be severely punished."
Seems legit. Would demand.

Nobody who wants "basic income" has thought through the negative consequences of what incentives it will create. It's a daft idea that only people who don't produce anything (ie, students and leftist wards of the state) think is good...because they expect to be the recipients.

>I want a political thread on Veeky Forums
>But I only want leftists to post in it.

Make me with your mod powers, you idiot.

>Why would anybody work?
Because it's the only way to keep society functioning as we begin approaching the technological singularity.

Manual labour is already performed by machines. Right now, administrative labour and office work is being phased out for pseudo-intelligent computer programs. It's only a matter of years before office work is completely redundant.
And from that point, slowly executive work will become a matter of machines.

NO ONE will have a job in the future. Only machines will work. No one will have an income. Everyone will be fucked. Everyone except scientists, artists and philosophers.

>If I am taxed for it, are larger businesses proportionally taxed?

Of course not.

Once a business is big enough, they move to Ireland so they don't have to pay taxes.

:^)

>Why the fuck do you think they're trying to build robots?

You goddamn /x/ retard. There won't be enough genetic variance left for humanity to keep existing.

>It would be bad if everyone had to become a scientist, artist or philosopher

The millions of niggers content to suck a government check and live in squalor just so they don't have to work prove you wrong.

That's hardly slavery. Slavery would be the government forcing you to tap wells for no pay and legally owning your ass. Taxes also aren't slavery because you're still getting money you can spend as you like, even if part of it goes to tax.

Unrestrained capitalism would easily result in slavery or de-facto slavery (see the "company store"), however, because of course if the employer can get a job done without having to pay or worrying about the employees switching to another company, then he'll do it that way (the whole point of a business is to make as much money as possible). That's why every civilized country has some laws that mandate the company must adhere to certain standards for employee's rights.

>Basic income keeps coming in regardless of how much money you make.
>Human psyche is weird. You get diminishing returns on happiness around 70k/year, but money actually incentivizes behavior more strongly the more you have.
>People are free to work without working for someone. Nerds with actual talent could devote their time to making webcomics or games or software without having to monetize it up front via employers or kickstarter schmoozing.
>Many products with no cost to produce units (pretty much anything digital) can now be released for free or much cheaper. Often reducing the startup costs for other freelancers.

It's been tested in a few instances. Sample sizes are small but you see major progress in the developing world. In the developed world you actually lose on a few economic measures to buy an across the board quality of life boost.

>Stern, if this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I'll be very unhappy.

>There won't be enough genetic variance left for humanity to keep existing.

All you need is around 10,000 people to sustain a population and prevent problems from inbreeding.

>b-b-but we need all the colors of the rainbow

Not at all true.

>the bern victim's prayer

Jesus christ you are naive.

People literally have more babies to continue getting government benefits. They live in one bedroom apartments with screaming children they despise. They are content here and actually receive programs to watch their kids so they can pursue labor or education but many forfiet this.

What you are offering is a free upgrade in standard of living for these people. This will not motivate them out.

Also it will create boom-bust cycles on labor as people elect to leave the work force price of labor goes up, people join workforce because it's more than basic income, labor market floods and wages tank to basic income levels. For this to happen you wouldn't even need half of all adults to participate to break the economy.

Also their would only be a handful of companies left eventually as smaller ones gonunder due to high labor costs and high taxation for basic income.

There isn't a fixed number. Genetic bottlenecks can create great numbers with insufficient variation. This was part of the reason the Columbian exchange went so badly for the new world.

Full text of the thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution, banning slavery:

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

See a huge glaring loophole, there?

That's not how it's going to work. What's going to happen is that as more and more work is automated, you'll end up with 80% unemployment. Very few people will have any money, so very few people will be able to afford education. Hard to be a scientist when you can't read or write. And then there will be things like food, housing, medical care, etc. that you still have to find some way to pay for even though you don't have a job. When you're struggling just to scrape together enough money for food and rent, it's hard to develop an intellectual pursuit. Malnutrition and the stress of constant eviction aren't very good for the mind.

The wealth of the society will pool in the hands of the few who own the robots. With that money comes power, which will allow them to force the government to give up on taxing them. And then with all of the society's wealth in the hands of people who can't be taxed, governments will cease to function simply because they have no money.

I-I fucked up.

[SPOILER] I wanted them to flock in and bump the thread/give me free (You)s [/SPOILER]

>Nerds with actual talent could devote their time to making webcomics or games

That's the first thing that leaped to your mind?

Vidya and webcomics?

Am curious. Anything else you can tell about man?

What's most likely to happen is automation caps set by industries and governments.

>As part of this process(honduran coup constitution change), the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:

>The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

It's a consumer good, so it's easiest to understand and sell people on. Software is probably a bigger deal but more abstract and speculative.

Global Islam

The people with wealth won't want automation caps, because that would limit them being able to turn their wealth into even more wealth via robots without having to bother with troublesome people. So it won't happen.

>you should give everyone free money because if you don't then there will be too much unemployment

Wow, tell me more

...I'm sorry I don't...

>set by industries
Why would they do that?
>and governments
Alright then move production to China or whatever country doesn't have caps

>produce non-tangible goods
>get ass raped by basic income tax as you are now a contributor
>make 1% more than your peers for 90 hour work weeks

Paradise

Or you get paid in script that's only usable at the Company Store.

>mud people in the third world are doing simple jobs in the laziest way possible to mooch off of tourists capitalism is ruined

There's going to be massive unemployment no matter what. The question is whether that 80% of the population should simply be allowed to become a permanent underclass that is constantly malnourished, largely illiterate, and as a result is condemned to simply suffer with little hope of being able to improve their lives.

And if you get paid in food stamps instead of script then we call that socialism

See