Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Slavery has never been defined as "forced labor" except by Libertarians, much in the same way nobody else thinks taxation is theft and nobody else makes a distinction between negative and positive rights to justify why the rights they value are righter than the ones other people value. It's defined as one human owning another. That's why animals can't be slaves. It's also why, f'rex, Roman slaves were owned but their labor often wasn't, allowing them to earn their own money and buy themselves freedom and citizenship.Because either its not, universally, just as all taxes aren't theft, or if slavery is defined so broadly we are all slaves, so whether its slavery or not is irrelevant.
Thusly conscription is not slavery because soldiers are not property, it is a form of labor.
You keep repeating that it's slavery but you can't actually back that up, your definition of slavery is one that either you or some other Libertarian made up to support their point. This tendency you have to use straw definitions for words that mean something else to everybody else, invariably picking an emotionally charged word like slavery or theft in order to take the discussion away from the logical and towards the emotive, is why you keep getting accused of pedantry.I didn't say "Justice". I said there was a cost to maintain society. There is work that must be done, in order to keep the society together and effective.
A lot of people aren't doing that, right now. A lot of people who tried have been punished for it. I was going to rant about the current "Justice" system, and why it's slowly falling apart, and why that's bad, but...... The problems are mach larger than that.
People have to feel that they are part of the system, and that the system might not be perfect, but it works, or they stop doing the work needed to keep it in existence.
None of this presumes that justice is anywhere but in our heads, but in most ways, so is civilization.
I think the only argument about that, whether conscription is not slavery, has to be rooted in the local culture, where it's accepted that conscription is something they do, and should, accept, leading to at least the vast majority being willing, thus not noncosenual.
However, that has flaws, in that there'll always be those who aren't willing. Might be a very small percentage, but still there.
So, slavery, yes. Please note, I don't see slavery as near as automatically bad as many do, I'm enough of a historian to understand the variations, exceptions, positives and negatives that make slavery vastly more flexible than most think.
One of the most powerful groups in Ye Olde China (for part of their history, anyway) were slaves, the Imperial Ecununchs. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure one of the later Roman Emperors was a former slave. There have been cases where the entire police force were slaves, and trusted as such.
Slavery, like justice, is a much bigger, more complex picture than most realise.
To examine this point we need merely look at Roman slaves, who were most assuredly slaves and yet routinely bought themselves out of slavery. How, if slavery was ownership of their labor, did they acquire money to do so? Simple, they were owned but their labor was still available to them and they could earn their manumission price over a period of years if they worked hard and invested wisely. Labor is not linked to slavery.
We see the same thing in Biblical times, there's specific instructions on how to proceed when a slave has earned enough money to buy their freedom, impossible if slavery is inseparable from the master owning the labor. Labor is not linked to slavery.
Slavery has nothing to do with labor, it's about the ownership of a human being.