[patriciaruth]

I wonder how many people know how common slavery was in the past? White people were also commonly enslaved in the Roman Empire among other places.

Thank heaven for labor slaving devices. I wonder if the reason slavery was relegated to history in most countries had more to do with the invention of the steam engine, etc. than to any increase in moral enlightenment.

[tjg]

Industrialization and freedom go hand in hand. Labor saving devices allow the institutions of liberal democracy to exist.

Less you take offense at the term liberal democracy, consider that the most conservative freeper today is more liberal than anyone alive 300 years ago.

[Doctor Stochastic]

To some extent. The Romans (some of them) tried freeing slaves and making them farmers around the time of Marcus Aurelius. The invention of the cotton gin allowed slavery to continue in the South; cotton needed more hand chopping than other crops; otherwise slavery might have died out earlier.

The Soviet experience (in the state-run industries) shows the lack of productivity of slave-labor. It's not only the physical work; a free worker will also use his (or her) mind to make more money. A slave (those with slave mentality) just "work to rules" and no more.