Slavery in The 21st Century

society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement
contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights:
The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to
sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.
Others like Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a
lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:
[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have
to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and
ceases to work.
Schools of Economics
In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the
voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts, just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a
farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship
and carries no particular moral implications.
Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor
because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third
party" of individuals.
Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of
bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not
"allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".
The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:
1. Libertarian socialism sees it as a lack of workers' self-management in the context
of substituting state and capitalist control with political and economic
decentralization and confederation.
2. State socialists view it as an injustice perpetrated by capitalists and solved
through nationalization and social ownership of the means of production.
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