Lars Walker makes an interesting point about slavery that I’d not previously considered:

The first thing to understand is that slavery is not an anomaly in human history. Our own society’s abolition of slavery is the anomaly. There have been very few cultures in the world – and those few very primitive – that did not practice slavery. Up until modern times the sophistication and greatness of a culture were almost always proportionate to its slave-holding.

This is because, up until the Industrial Revolution, slaves were the only labor-saving devices that existed.

He stretches the point slightly; water wheels and wind mills predate the industrial revolution by a good bit, I believe, and I suspect you’d have to define serfdom as a moderate form of slavery for his argument to hold. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of truth to what he says.

Read the whole thing, except possibly for the opening paragraphs on snow and roof rakes.