The Slave Trade
Centuries of institutionalized slavery is proof enough that law and order can be misused by some to extract profits from others. When that happens, and it always does, enforcing law and order becomes an act of self-preservation, to protect and defend the privileged economic order of the establishment by preventing democracy and a peaceful political succession to a more representative government.
Slavery is illegal now. So in our so-called civilized society, inequality is maximized as a substitute, which creates an adversary and, without correction, conflict becomes unavoidable, and the slaves revolt, as expected, validating the need for more law and order.
When laws are written for unethical profits, permitting slavery for instance, they deserve to be criticized, and broken, until they are corrected and enforced for ethical compliance.
The slave trade as described by Marcus Rediker is a horrifying history of what people will do to others for profits. History is full of examples of terror and treachery and institutional betrayal, for profit.
Why would we think that’s changed?
Philosophically simplified here, and condensed for efficient literary consumption, consider the political spectrum to be freedom on one side and slavery on the other.
Freedom can be described as self representation with comparative choice. Slavery is exactly the opposite of that. A slave has no comparative choice, or self-representation.
That’s why citizenship of the nation state is so unique and important, comparatively. It’s an attempt to emancipate everybody based on geography, and democracy, and representation.
Money is representation now. Without money you are a slave to your needs. You are dependent on those who control your resources. You are at the mercy of their ethical benevolence almost as if they owned you, legally or not.
Slavery and freedom can be measured in amounts of wealth. They are not merely abstract terms of philosophical pontification. In our current monetary system, degrees of freedom can be quantified mathematically based on the amount of money people have.
Slavery is inequality maximized. Corporations exist to maximize profits for their shareholders, which results in maximizing inequality, which motivates markets to tolerate and even advocate, slavery.
Corporations facilitate slavery by exclusion.
The government subsidizing corporations and investors enslaves those who are not subsidized, comparatively. The enslavement is by overcompensating some and depriving others. The corporatizing of the the middle class has created two distinct competing classes.
One class squeezes the other for profits. Guess which one.
The uninvested taxpaying workers are forced into a constant money chase compared to those who are invested in the publicly subsidized corporate markets.
Institutional slavery is not motivated by racism, it’s about profits and privilege. Of all the despicable things people have done for profit, declaring ownership of others is about the worst.
Owning people is illegal now.
You don’t have to own somebody to enslave them. You just need to control their resources. That’s how we do it now. It’s “normal”.
Institutional slavery is achieved nowadays by inequality, by depriving people of an adequate income and necessary resources like a home, or a job, health and education.
All of which should be human rights, imo.
Globalism is a perfect example of resource control to maximize profits for investors. The byproduct of globalism is maximized inequality and therefore institutional slavery. It’s just a matter of degree.
The degree of inequality, like slavery, is a political choice.
Everything that can be made in America should be made in America, as a rule, and all imports regulated with tariffs to protect domestic commerce, to correct the institutionalized slavery that we have here.
Global trade and investment enables the extraction scam.
A never ending stream of IPO’s will attempt to eventually corporatize all commerce, to extract investor profits from as many transactions as possible. Corporations will monopolize commerce, if allowed, by using previously speculated profits to buy out Main Street, completely.
Which is a bad thing.
Investor profits equate to higher prices for consumers and lower wages for workers, not to mention higher inflation and taxes for everybody. The increasing inequality is by design and needs to be corrected to prevent the national demise.
The extraction scam happens on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Extracting profits from the public occurs in the “markets”, where money keeps making more money despite the ugly indicators of inequality and the ever increasing public debt.
The scam wouldn’t work if there was an honest sheriff in town protecting the taxpayers. But the sheriffs around here are all heavily invested in the scam, apparently. Who isn't?
Market profits and public debt rise in tandem. They are the same transaction. Investing has become an extraction scam that siphons wealth from the public to profit investors with taxpayer money.
Private profits from the extraction scam create the public debt and make massive inequality the norm. The public is broke.
The reconciliation is self evident.
Investors will argue that the tax-extraction/subsidized-market scam is not a scam, but it is. Our entire “financial system” needs to be corrected to serve the common good, because it doesn’t.
Then you say, “But that’s my money, not yours.”
Then they say “All fortunes are part of the much larger historical crime of slavery and reparations are due."
Then I say, yes that’s true. It’s all true.
What to do, what to do?
The solution is the health-based economy.
The more inequality you have the more law enforcement you need. The division is ultimately used to suppress democracy, proving that inequality is a political strategy being used to suppress democracy.
The logical conclusion and solution therefore would be to prevent poverty to reduce inequality and conflict. Give the people what they need and stop funding the division. It is the right thing to do.
Slavery was made illegal because people could see it. Slavery is much different now that “economic institutions" have been corporatized and globalized, and have been subsidized to enslave those who are not “invested” in the scam. It’s very clever. You can only see it if you look.