Who the hell would WANT slaves today? The only slaves you hear about today are the illegal aliens hired by rich people who become candidates for public office. In recent history this was a common campaign scandal.
But this kind of slavery is for the super rich and the very, VERY rich.
I know a number of merely very rich people. None of them has a regular daily maid.
From what I see the difference is that the merely very rich live in very rich COMMUNITIES. They have huge expensive houses that are next to other huge expansive houses. Their neighbors know exactly who lives there, and the community is very touchy about add-ons where strangers can be allowed to stay for long periods of time.
The very, VERY rich live in COMPOUNDS like OJ Simpson’s’. He could let anybody live with him in a little add-on. He could have had a live-in illegal without comment from his neighbors. A live-in domestic slave is a natural result of this sort of arrangement.
Hence domestic slavery was a phenomenon of limousine liberalism.
Limousine liberals who want to run for public office are now very careful about his now, so it is not as common a SCANDAL today. But I wonder if the very, VERY rich in general have cut down on domestic slavery.
#1 by Dave on 02/27/2008 - 5:16 pm
One thing many of the very rich value enormously is loyalty. In my experience their domestic slaves, which usually live in very comfortable and nice quarters, are long term and almost treated like family.
A big problem arises, however, if these domestic servants are illegal and don’t have the right to work in America. I imagine this problem is pretty widespread among wealthy families, particularly in New York.
You can have lived in America for a decade, but if you cannot prove that you came into the country “with inspection”, you face a long legal process in getting documented. If you have been here less than a decade and were snuck into the country, immigration judges won’t document you. But they won’t throw you out either. So you are left in a limbo without documents.
It is getting harder and harder for these people to function with fake IDs because of the DHS’s social security number matching program that started last October.
The rich family, then, is just stuck harboring their illegal servant.
Legal processes can become public, especially if a reporter wants to investigate. I bet there are a lot of rich people sweating bullets over this.
The whole immigration system is tightening up from the standpoint of IDs, not inflows.
#2 by shari on 02/27/2008 - 7:31 pm
To have a domestic slave these days, with every conceivable convenience, and millions, is absolutely insane. I have always heard that the rich are rich because they are smarter. Well, maybe so, but the super rich are stark, raving, mad.
#3 by shari on 02/28/2008 - 9:56 am
Well, my view of the super rich is very different from Dave’s. Out west they are building whole private towns. Skilled craftsmen are treated with comtempt. They have to have identification and are stopped and asked for it daily to go to the work they were hired for. They buy cheap hotels down the canyon for “our people”, cheap labor, illegals. There is no reason to suppose that furtive domestic slaves would be treated kindly. This isn’t the Old South. What they wish to create is a pyramid, with them permanently at the top. They are anti-racist, which means they are anti-white.
#4 by mderpelding on 02/29/2008 - 6:57 pm
Good header;
“Who the hell would WANT slaves today? ”
The real question should be…
“Just why is slavery bad?”.
Oh, I know, because slaves were starved and whipped and worked to death and stuff just like the Roman Empire and the Antebellum South.
Yup..the Roman Navy relied on sick and starving oarsmen to provide motive power for their Triremes in battle.
Not only that, but those Romans worked slaves to the DEATH…
YES…TO THE DEATH!!!!!!
Mining ore, picking crops, serving households.
How efficient is a starving half dead man?
I’ll bet his recuperative costs will outweigh his productivity.
All modern idiots commenting on slavery remind me of PETA people complaining about dairy farmers mistreatment of cows.
Tell me, what does the modern mob desire from their government?
A job.
Health care.
A roof over their head.
Food in their bellies.
Guaranteed.
To be as slaves.
Maybe we should redefine slavery as the “desire to let others rule us”.
Maybe we should define “Aristocrat” as “one who rules himself”.
In the modern world, the term “slavery” is considered the ultimate evil because for the last few hundred years the Marxist/Liberal belief that the nature of the slave is the result of the action of the master somehow oppressing the slave has been adopted as the common human dynamic.
But think about this…
With the adoption of so-called “mob ruled democracy”, the desire of the common man is to be cared for as a chattel slave.
Guaranteed employment.
A roof over ones head.
Food.
Medical care.
Security in old age.
And….
A job for my kids.
A home for them.
Food.
Medical care for my future generations.