Ten reasons why slavery should not be abolished. 1. Slavery is natural. People differ, and we must expect that those who are superior in a certain way for example, in intelligence, morality, knowledge, technological prowess, or capacity for fighting will make themselves the masters of those who are inferior in this regard. Abraham Lincoln expressed this idea in one of his famous 1858 debates with Senator Stephen Douglas: 2. Slavery has always existed. A key principle espoused by conservatives as well as Libertarians like Hayek, is that, although we may not understand why a social institution persists, its persistence may nonetheless be well grounded in a logic we have yet to understand. Consequently it would be dangerous to get rid of our proud institution of slavery that was handed down to us by our forefathers. This idea can also be summed in the old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". 3. Every society on earth has slavery. The sheer pervasiveness of the institution of slavery constitutes compelling proof of its necessity. A key reason may simply be practicality. Every society has slavery because certain kinds of work are so difficult or degrading that no free person will do them, and therefore unless we have slaves to do these jobs, they will not get done. Someone, as the saying went in the Old South, has to be the mud sill, and free people will not tolerate serving in this capacity. 4. The slaves are not capable of taking care of themselves. People such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who regarded slavery as morally reprehensible, continued to hold slaves and to obtain personal services from them and income from the products that these "servants" (as they preferred to call them) were compelled to produce. They did so because it would be cruel to set free people who would then, at best, fall into destitution and suffering. 5. Without masters, the slaves will die off. Following on from (4), the natural end result of removing the masters will be high death rates. In 1865, Northern journalists traveling in the South immediately after the war reported that, indeed, the blacks were in the process of becoming extinct because of their high death rate, low birth rate, and miserable economic condition. This is sad but true. As the first-hand observers declared, the freed people really were too incompetent, lazy, or immoral to behave in ways consistent with their own group survival. 6. Where the common people are free, they are even worse off than slaves. As sociologist George Fitzhugh wrote, freeing the negroes of the South merely means instituting a system of 'wage slavery' in which nineteen out of twenty individuals have the inalienable right to be slaves. We should do away with so-called free competition which enriches the strong and crushes the weak and we should adopt socialism which affords protection and support at all times to the labouring class. We need to remedy the inequalities of the working man and get rid of the exploitation favoured by our Northern brethren. Indeed slavery fulfills all of these ambitions perfectly. Slavery is already socialism in all save the master. 7. Getting rid of slavery would occasion great bloodshed and other evils. Slaveholders will never permit the termination of the slave system without an all-out fight to preserve it. Sure enough, when the Confederacy and the Union went to war set aside that the immediate issue was not the abolition of slavery but the secession of eleven Southern states great bloodshed and other evils did ensue. These tragic events could have been prevented if people had only opposed abolition in favour of the greater benefit of a stable and safe society. 8. Without slavery the former slaves would run amuck, stealing, raping, killing, and generally causing mayhem. Such an uprising is self-evidently true. Preservation of social order therefore rules out the abolition of slavery. It is bad enough that our cities are already sufficiently intolerable, owing to the massive influx of drunken, brawling young men into places like Kings Cross or radicalised, law-hating terrorists into SW-Sydney. Throwing free blacks into the mix would well-nigh guarantee social chaos. 9. Trying to get rid of slavery is foolishly utopian and impractical; only a fuzzy-headed dreamer would advance such a cockamamie proposal. Serious people cannot afford to waste their time considering such farfetched ideas. 10. Forget abolition. A far better plan is to keep the slaves sufficiently well fed, clothed, housed, and occasionally entertained and to take their minds off their exploitation by encouraging them to focus on the better life that awaits them in the hereafter. We cannot expect fairness or justice in this life, but all of us, including the slaves, can aspire to a life of ease and joy in Paradise. With special thanks to the members like Newtosilver for enlightening me on this topic.
The original had a couple more paragraphs that shed a different light on it: Edit: The opening paragraph is important too:
slaves? Bedroom, laundry and kitchen! (and in their spare time, the garden.) Sounds fair! Then again, I have always been an old softy! OC
Exactly! Here is the original source (I believe): http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ten-reasons-not-to-abolish-slavery The closing paragraph states "Today these reasons or very similar ones are used by opponents of a different form of abolitionism: the proposal that government as we know itmonopolistic, individually nonconsensual rule by an armed group that demands obedience and payment of taxesbe abolished. "
11 We live in a deterministic world. There is no such thing as free will and therefore people can only ever make the choice that they actually made and so therefore choices that people make cannot be defined as being right or wrong as they were just a natural outcome of the universe. Therefore, if choices can't be right or wrong, slavery, being a choice that society made, is not wrong and there was no reason to abolish it.
12. The abolitionists disregard moral, ethical and cultural relativism. There are no moral truths and no ethical system is better than another. There is no such thing as right and wrong, good or evil. A moral relativist accepts that his own moral system is meaningless and is accepted on whim, not reason. The abolitionists need to understand that ethics are irrelevant and we only accept them due to societal conditioning. The only truly evil act is to maintain the possibility of truth in ethics.
:lol: Property rights and self-ownership and negative rights. You own yourself and whatever is produced by your labour, or whatever you have agreed to share with others (through a mutually agreed contract). No-one else can prove that they have a right to you or your labour. Therefore, it doesn't matter about morals, relative or not, the simple fact is that the right to own someone else just doesn't exist. How was that?
I've got to bring myself to stop posting on this forum. There are parts where it's a intellectual, moral and Godless vacuum. Moral relativism sounds like Alister Crowley's and Satanism "do as thou wilt", there's no such thing as right and wrong. This thread is just so evil on so many levels.
You dirty abolitionist. More seriously, if you're in the mood try Sections II and III of Chapter 11 in Hoppe's book. Shiney! and I have been getting into it recently.
You should have an "an" not an "a" before intellectual. "There are parts where it's an intellectual, moral and Godless vacuum." I can't help you with the moral and the Godless vacuum part though.
Poe's Law: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing." In other words, No matter how bizzare, outrageous, or just plain idiotic a parody of a Fundamentalist may seem, there will always be someone who cannot tell that it is a parody, having seen similar REAL ideas from real religious/political Fundamentalists
