What’s So Bad About Slavery?

(From an old LRC post)

What’s So Bad About Slavery?

A thought: nothing is wrong with slavery per se–a criminal who is imprisoned as a result of a crime is in essence enslaved. The problem with slavery–e.g., of Africans in the antebellum US–is that the slave is enslaved not as punishment for a crime but because of some other irrelevant action or status (e.g., being black). But this is the same problem with all positive laws that outlaw peaceful behavior, e.g. tax laws, drug laws, and so on.

Yet most opponents of African slavery do not oppose all victimless crime laws. That is, they are not against slavery. They are happy with actual criminals (aggressors) being enslaved (as are we libertarians); and they have no problem with enslaving other non-aggressors, who happen to violate whatever arbitrary positive laws are on the books. They are not anti-slavery at all. They simply seem to oppose one narrow ground for slavery–that is, they are against enslaving people based on the blackness of skin, but don’t seem to have a problem with other arbitrary and unfair “grounds”.