A stunningly terrifying piece of writing. It is imperative as many people as possible read this article. if you do read it, then please, share it on all your Social Media platforms

A legal system that prioritizes property rights over other rights is no longer a democracy. It is feudalism.

We see the ante bellum south in America was a bit more vile than traditional feudalism.
You owned people, or you walked the earth if you were not considered property.
Who else walks the earth?

Feudal lords had obligations to their serfs. Southern slave owners had none to their slaves.

Likewise, modern capitalists have no obligations to their workers.

Independent contractors, I’ll have you know!!

They are a great threat to this system. They have autonomy. Removing the capacity to move from working where you choose, when you choose is the goal of this ideology of libertarianism. The gig economy and capacity for it to create worker owned cooperatives would be outlawed. The goal of Buchanan was to have workers no more free than braceros - tied inextricably to an employer, no rights of any kind, unable to move, unable to resist.

Hear dat. [raises hand]

This didn’t age well as California Uber drivers demanded to be allowed to independently contract.

Southern slave owners may have not had any obligation of support to their slaves. But self interest in the productivity of an expensive asset may have been a stronger force in getting slaveslaves fed and housed than what happened to sharecroppers or tenant farmers once the slaves were freed.

That didn't stop Southern slave owners from working their slaves to death. Slaves were cheaper than a good horse. Sharecroppers at least didn't have slavecatchers chasing after them if they left and it wasn't flat-out illegal for them to get an education or vote or run for office. Those things were difficult to manage and were more paper rights than real ones for a long time, but some ex-slaves still pulled it off.

Sharecropping flat-out sucked every bit as much as those former slaveholders could make it, but it was still better than slavery.

I don’t think Appalachia’s coal miners and the company store gets enough play. Coal mines owned these people economically. Life underground without light. One of my worst memories of childhood was going to my step mothers relatives home. A trailer in a holler.. heat with coal that cling in that hollow without light in the winter coal ash killing vegetation that the smoke didn’t get and miserable relative in their 40or fifties hacking the cough of black lung. I had poor Alabama relatives that still used outdoor toilets, but their poverty and sharecropper history did not seem so depressing. They had gardens, fished, chickens, tar paper shacks but life. The coal mining area was much worse, sad, dirty , and dark..

The return of scrip payment, of store debt and the capacity to bind workers eternally through that system, would be very appealing to Buchanan. Saves cash, keeps people immobile and docile.

See immigrants hired seasonaly just to pick crops and then return home after their work is done.
Then wonder about The Trump's Mar a Lago resort -"Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and his golf course in Jupiter, Florida, have filed documents to bring in additional foreign workers under the H-2B visa program, which allows foreigners to fill temporary non-agriculture jobs in the United States that supposedly cannot be filled by US workers."

Round here we call that White Privilege.

take a trip to Magnolia Plantation and take the slave cabin tour. It might just open your eyes.

Which one? I've worked at the one in North Carolina.

This Magnolia Plantation is near Charleston, South Carolina, near Drayton Hall and Middleton Place on the River Rd. Sorry, I should have said where.

Point out an instance of Buchanan defending slavery.

Don't get caught up in comparisons to the detriment of the point: oppression by the institutionally powerful must be combated in every dynamic then and now: slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow/segregation, the judicial system, wage labor, the service economy.

Charming. I'm sure it looks all the same kind of bad from that ivory tower of yours, but there were and are major degrees of difference between free and unfree oppression. It's why people as a group choose legal emancipation every time and why those legally owning them fight it so hard and try to devalue it. Being a slave is *not* the same as being free and poor.

But Buchanan wants to reduce or eliminate the 'being free' part as much as possible. He wasn't advocating outright slavery, but the idea of bound labor was appealing.

Don't conflate those either. Wage labor and the service economy have obtained rights via years of labor work and the New Deal laws. The point of Buchanan's ideology is to reduce all working people to the cheapest most unfree system he and his followers could create. Zero minimum wage, no political rights, bound labor - whatever frees capital and imprisons labor.

After the banning of the slave trade domestically bred slaves became an expensive asset. The owners preferred severe punishment/torture for the slightest offense to working the slaves to death. Exceptionally severe, even fatal punishments were performed to discourage any deviations from the submissive behavior and high productivity the owners demanded.

None of what you just said contradicts what I said. Horses were more valuable than slaves and they got worked to death all the time.

only when private prisons came into practice,

cost of slave
https://www.measuringworth....

cost of horse
https://www.google.com/sear...

You know what's really gross? Trying, two days after the anniversary of its abolition in the U.S., to justify the defunct institution of American slavery by downplaying how ugly it was for the people trapped in it or to pretend that they were worse off after achieving their freedom.

Estimating historic prices of sale (only one way of estimating economic value) is dodgy, at best (for example, there are estimates online that a baby born a slave in 1850 was worth $100 and a good saddle horse $150), but it's all just handwaving on your part anyway because you have no answer to my main point--that Southern slave owners worked their slaves to death, that they *beat* them to death, and that they could and did starve them to death, too.

That's why wage slavery benefitted the wealthy more: you don't have to take care or old or sick employees if the government doesn't force you to.

Leasing slaves from southern prisons freed the plantation owners from cost of care. After Reconstruction was abandoned and white rule restored and displaced plantation owners restored to their estates, the plantation owners, and other business owners, boasted that the new system of leasing slaves from prisons was just great for their profits. And of course strong Afro-American males could be imprisoned long term for the slightest offense or no crime at all.

you don't even have to keep them all the time when you don't need them, just throw them back into the streets with all the other wage-slaves.

The northern mill producers of "slave cloth" for clothing of slave labor became abolitionist. That's rather to their credit since it meant the death of their business if slavery ended. The plantation owners, their customers, pointed out that the Northern mill owners were just as bad in how they treated their workers. They weren't wrong. You're correct that waged labor is free - to support itself inadequately on what's paid with no help in sickness and aging.

That "slave cloth" was denim. It is still produced in various form today as Levis & jeans.

The systems that followed slavery have been profoundly exploitative, but even so, free black workers have gotten a larger share of the product of their work than they did under slavery. The actual benefits to the slaves, of the owners' "self interest in caring for an expensive asset" were not as great as theory might suggest. Slaves in parts of North America survived and reproduced better than in South America and the Caribbean, where they simply died quickly and were replaced; but routine brutal punishment had more to do with extracting productivity, than any kind of care or good treatment.

Also medical. However once slavery ended, private prisons came into being where the new slaves were easily replaced.

To be fair slaves in the South were valuable property. However once they were freed and for-profit prisons were created, if any died you just went out and arrested more to fill the prison up.

They DO have obligations based in laws. That's what Buchanan wished to remove.

Yes that is true. .a wage that is is often as small as they can make it.

Kane (David Carridin)

Caine (David Caradine).

Carradine

homeless people

And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it

Uh yea..these guys OBVIOUSLY don't believe in god..sooo get off your butt..and help ok..quoting scripture never helped anything except make the person quoting feel superior...thoughts and prayers are useless if you aren't proactive as well..here's one..god helps those that help themselves..thats the ONLY scripture that should be quoted during a disaster..like the destruction of Democracy as we know it.

Also, "God helps those who help themselves" is not Scripture.

Yes. Ben Franklin.

He also said people like Trump were a parasite on society. And that only he should profit off of his work.

Why did you just agree with him & then quote a verse supposedly to refute me that had nothing to do with it?

Religion has not helped correct these wrongs.

'Religion's, no. People acting in the spirit of a loving God, mist definitely help remedy so many bad situations.

Unfortunately, people acting in the spirit of their god definitely create or make worse some bad situations.

Overall, I think the world would be a better place without religion.

It would be worse. But how much might debatable.