Quote from: jameslink2 on October 02, 2012, 12:19 pmPine, I think this cuts directly to the heart of the assignment and discussion of a true free market as well as the governments view of a person.Slavery is defined as "The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household." (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/slavery)So the question is Who owns the people? In a free market we are sovereign and are owned by no one unless we sell ourselves. Most governments believe they own the people and are thus entitled to a percentage of the work a person does (Income Tax), the right to take property away from that person, and the right to tell that person how they can live there lives. Well governments do use coercion all the time but we were talking about how voluntary transactions of this sort can lead to coercion.QuoteIf we can not sell ourselves then we have no sovereignty and must acknowledge that we are already owned and our life is not our own.No. Selling yourself (according to pine) is a null right. It cannot exist in a free market. You and kmfkewm assume that because I prevent you using that right, that I then take that right from you. This doesn't make sense to me because I am not availing of that right in any way. Rights are not physical units like commodities, they are activities or actions. So if your rights are not used, then they for all intents and purposes are non existent. You have no right. But neither do I. Nobody has it, it's just gone. Nullified.Property on the other hand, *is* transferable. If you are a programmer, you could think of Property as an 'Object' and rights as a 'Method'. I can control your rights if I own you. If I do this then kmfkewm and jameslink are correct to say I have taken your rights. But if my action of preventing you exercising your right to sell yourself into slavery is the case then I don't own you, it's a logical contradiction to say pine owns you when pine has explicitly made it impossible for anybody to own you except yourself.Quote from: kmfkewm on October 02, 2012, 12:20 pm2. (Business / Industrial Relations & HR Terms) a person who is forced to work for another against his willI believe that most people use definition 2 from the second block of definitions. At least I have always thought of slavery as being involuntary servitude.Yes, that is what slavery is. Owning somebody == involuntary servitude, they are the exact same thing. That's why selling yourself into slavery isn't a legitimate voluntary transaction. The transaction itself is voluntary, yes. Everything that follows is completely coercive since you aren't a free agent. Even if you agreed with every single thing your owner told you to do and think, you still aren't a free agent because there were no choices.The institution of slavery does not recognize humans a special category. The idea of some benevolent agency to look after the children of slaves or some slave union to send hit squads after evil pine just cannot happen because there is no reason for those institutions to exist. Those operations are in fact illegal when slavery is an institution. The benevolent agency has kidnapped my labor and the assassination attempt would have police attempting to foil it because everything evil pine is doing is completely legal.Anyway, I said I'd stop, so this time I shall really stop! :D