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Entry: Bloody kansas Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/bloody_kansas#8248 Post contents: Re "slavery", I have no objection to the 13th Amendment prohibition of "involuntary servitude", but one wonders just how "voluntary" most kinds of servitude are today in an almost totally bureaucratised and hyper-abstract economy in which entrepreneurialism - the real kind, not its parvenu stepchild, "salesmanship" or "marketing" (even more unreal today than it was in the time of the Fuller Brush Man and Avon Lady) - has become almost impossible. Today's working class might enjoy more material comfort than the slaves of the Old South, but how much more "free" are they really? Alright, I admit that's a bit hyperbolic. But then compare the liberties and social status of today's working class against those of ancient Rome's working class, aka "slaves". At least they - or many of them - enjoyed something approximating family relations and reciprocal loyalty with their masters. But today's American working class, by and large enjoy neither reciprocal loyalty with their masters (and the personal dignity and social status contingent upon it), NOR much real economic freedom, nor much authentic personal property other than what they in effect "rent", including their mortgaged houses. I think a thousand years from now (I'm an optimist about the survival of our civilisation, and of all good things, in the LONG run) the humiliating, untstable and degrading conditions of today's American working class will be compared unfavourably to those of ancient Rome. The material poverty of Rome's servant class (that's a more accurate and more significant term than "slaves") was, for its time, not really worse than that of Americans today, but the spiritual poverty of America's servant class is arguably more horrific than that of the Roman slaves. Sent at: 2008 07 23