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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.

Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias

I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.

In other words, economic feasibility had to be achieved to consider such things at all; formalizing the changes in law is a lagging indicator.

it is trickier, it is similar to slavery: economical progress enables to get rid of it (or makes it much easier), but activism/law also has its place and is necessary to eliminate some abuse that would be present otherwise

Slavery was legal and then made illegal in the West. As a matter of classic liberalism in terms of morality, it was never great to treat some humans as property since that's pretty darn coercive. Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

At no point do I or would I say a policy intervention is never called for. I am not an anarcho-capitalist. Some externalities demand government intervention. We should tax carbon and price congestion, for example.

Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

Slavery can make sense for the slave owner economically if they have an efficient system for preventing rebellion/runaways/etc or can outsource enforcement to the government or someone else, but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion. Some of the smarter slave owners even realized this and would pay cash incentives (or other similar rewards) to productive slaves. Sometimes they would even rent out their slaves to others and allow the slaves to keep a portion of the earnings!

Slavery starts with a disadvantage to begin with, any system with six people working for their own incentives has a numbers and morale advantage over a system with five workers who gain nothing and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves.

Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.

It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy. The owner says who does what, and while the smaller nature of it compared to a country doesn't make it as inefficient, it still suffers.

That doesn't mean slavery can't and doesn't work, even the worst systems still tend to be a little productive because people are doing labor in them but overall as a society having a bunch of rent seeking middlemen tends to be a drain on growth. We see a similar thing now where some labor markets have an opposite issue, workers/unions have too much power and demand a bunch of busy work like elevator workers literally taking things apart and putting them back together that could be better spent elsewhere growing the economy through labor that is actually needed.

Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, where entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the U.S.

If slavery is the balance leaning too much towards the employers where they get lazy and inefficient, stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.

but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion.

nitpick: if job is so horrible that noone sane would agree to do it, then your choices include

  • improving job situation
  • relying on few insane people
  • leaving it not done
  • slavery

For example ancient world mines tended to be absolutely horrific, and at least partially it was unsolvable without technological progress. Aztecs were fans of human sacrifice and it is quite hard to get volunteers for that, especially at scale that Aztecs believed to be necessary. Also, bunch of deviant sexual practices.

But all of that is not really applicable in modern world or widely considered to be evil. I guess if you look hard enough you will find people going "actually sex slavery is fine and laudable" and meaning it, but...

Put the factory workers in the same union to demand the right to preassemble and hole drill. Make two wrongs make a right.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't. So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

Chattel slavery was illegal in Christian Europe by the High Middle Ages. (This ban never extended to overseas possessions). Serfdom was abolished in the vast majority of France by 1318, and de facto in England by 1500. Serfdom also appears to be the exception rather than the rule in Northern Italy.

Western Europe produces a distinctive civilisation long before that civilisation industrialises.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today and the free nations are far more wealthier than the less free ones in modern times so it seems like this exact thing happened. Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

And vice versa, the economies that became more free and more capitalist and more willing to use positive incentives to encourage work instead of allowing as many rent seekers to profit off of things they didn't do brought us into the modern world.

It's not the only factor, there's a ton of different important details. But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today

Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).

Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

There was plenty of competition in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea... but slavery still persisted.

But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.

Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).

Yeah it does, any individual inefficiency and weakness is a lot less meaningful when the whole thing is made up of inefficiencies and weaknesses. Like let's use top athletes and gamers as an example, they're having to optimize the most niche and unimportant elements of their field in order to gain an advantage while beginners just have to do simple things like practice a few more times or learn the rules more to get significant improvement. One of the things I noticed watching bronze OW players in vod reviews years back is that quite a few of them just needed to learn what each characters ultimate did.

When there's much bigger issues in a less competitive environment, smaller optimizations don't really give that much of an advantage. A player who knows what the characters do and how to hold high ground and hits 54% of shots will almost always do better than the player who doesn't know but hits 58%.

Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.

The slave owner doesn't provide zero value, they do serve similar to a factory owner in that they're the peak of management. But unlike modern capitalism where people tend to get in that management position because of talent and skill at management, slavery tends to happen because of skill at other things. Especially back when generational wealth and power was even more meaningful, fail child kings and queens would stay in place until a revolution whereas the big rich names of 50-100 years ago are practically meaningless today. No one is talking about the Rothschilds and the Carnegies, we're talking about Bezos and Musk.

The slave owner doesn't provide zero value, they do serve similar to a factory owner in that they're the peak of management.

Which is a great deal larger than zero.

But unlike modern capitalism where people tend to get in that management position because of talent and skill at management, slavery tends to happen because of skill at other things.

Getting to the top of a hierarchy requires the same basic skills regardless of what the hierarchy is. A cynic would say "backstabbing and douchebaggery", though admittedly it's not ONLY that.

No one is talking about the Rothschilds and the Carnegies, we're talking about Bezos and Musk.

Don't the Rothschilds still run The Economist? If nobody's talking about them (aside from the DR, occasionally), it's because they don't want to be talked about.

But all of this is besides the point, which is that until very recently there weren't any successful non-slaveowning societies. Which very strongly suggests that slavery was an advantage.

It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy.

And now you know why all planned economies are indistinguishable from slave-owning operations.

It doesn't matter if you're less efficient at distributing labor when labor is not the limiting factor in your economy's growth. When labor is so worthless that laborers are actively competing to give it away, you (as a seller of labor) will find you must abide by more and more restrictions to sell that labor. This can include working longer hours, suffering quotas and beatings, not offending the master, actively making your job harder, and so on and so forth.

Note that, as you've identified, this labor isn't actually free to a buyer- you need to provide food and shelter (or the option to acquire those things). You don't even have to post guards if labor is sufficiently worthless (you do need them to ensure you're extracting the maximum potential from your slaves' labor)- there's nowhere for them to go, no better deal to be had, and they know that. It's more economically efficient if you provide these necessities yourself at the lowest resource cost possible, but they must be provided.

A minimum wage under slavery can be (especially when slaves are captured through conquest) zero, but zero is the lowest it can go. When the minimum wage for labor goes negative in an environment like this your slaves have no choice but to come after you for what's stored in your pantry- once enough people die of starvation, the supply of labor contracts, the wage goes back up to zero and equilibrium is restored.

Now, you might think that if something happened that grew agricultural productivity by an order of magnitude that the minimum wage would fall out, but it turns out that's not the case- instead, it freed up so many people to do so many different things that the supply of labor, then educated labor, started to become a limiting factor.

You may know that period as the Renaissance- typified by abolitions of slavery in European nations, AKA the first society-wide minimum wage law. Slavery wasn't abolished in the colonies for obvious economic reasons: the cost of labor was still basically zero there (and subsidized by colonial governments' conquest of those places).

Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.

No, slave societies invest in automation as much as they're physically able. The reason a slave society becomes a slave society is to get enough food that the most powerful are able to fund this, because if it is unable or unwilling it quickly finds itself enslaved by a rival society. That is why

and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves

is ultimately bullshit. While it is a meme for a reason, and market distortions such as 'no rival powers' can result in this- eventually a stronger society comes along and destroys them. The Confederate States lost to the Union because the Union outproduced them, and they outproduced them because their society was more industrious.

Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.

stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.

Note that the market forces that workers' ability to completely capture the regulatory apparatus also leads to depopulation- because said capture will always eventually make it too expensive for workers to produce more workers. This is the real reason TFR was an order of magnitude higher 200 years ago.

Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.

Unionized companies spend more on salaries and the like, but do you have evidence for a productivity difference between unionized and non union blue collar workplaces? While there’s surely a profitability difference actual productivity doesn’t seem to differ that much.

but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood

Indentured servitude fixes this. I'm half kidding, but I think at least two of my ancestors were indentured at Jamestown.

Unions are bad, in my view. Should not be legally empowered by the government as they have been.

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