Oh boy. We technically got rid of slavery after the Civil War but in actual practice the line is quite blurry. Joseph Stiglitz made a really good point about freedom when analyzed through an economic lens. You can't just talk about political freedom but also the opportunity set as afforded to you by your economic status. Even if you have political freedom but only one choice, that freedom isn't much use.

I never really understood why the US are used as a baseline for anything social-related.

Concerning Stieglitz, it’s unclear to me whether we owe non-contributing members their freedom. The federal USA costs a trillion per semester, so it’s 6400$ per year. Those who don’t contribute so much per year, are a weight upon the others. If anything, the actual-workers are slaves of the poor people.

Granted, social friction makes that it is not possible to make everyone contribute efficiently. But we owe them money only because the society is not perfectly organized, not because they’re poor.

As for the slavery induced by the prison IO system, it is obviously inhumane and we should repay the victims probably a few hundred dollars per day in jail.

Our constitution allows slavery if you are imprisoned. So we already have literal modern garden-variety slavery.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't wonder why there aren't persistent, ongoing riots in the US.

Rioting puts you in jail.

At some point things get so bad that stops being a deterrent. Why the US population is so placid remains a mystery.

The level of surveillance makes it impossible to form coherent organizational structures domestically which can effectively oppose this system, because your organizations' and family's financial, communication, and social lives can be mapped out for strategic legal attack by the very same players they wish to protest. This is the price of KYC & AML.

This presumes an organized resistance. That's not what I was talking about. I'm surprised there aren't more regular reactions out of sheer anger, like the BLM riots.