Human capital cannot be owned by another person or traded on a market (not permanently, at any rate).

This is also a problem because a human being can have a very high value or no value in the current economy.

A human is only capital if he serves the machines. If he can add value by pulling a level, driving a vehicle, or optimizing a compiler, he is rewarded. People who give advice, or heal wounds, are mere "after-market" suppliers. Fixing people so they can go and run machines.

However, a human sitting alone in a field, not pulling a plow has no value.

Contrast this with a slave, who was always fairly valued whether at work or idle.

Our current economy has no such similar concept, therefore, we often starve and go homeless. The much maligned hipster, sipping espresso, has no value because he is not a slave, except to his mother, who sends him money so he can eat.

Now, imagine instead of bitcoin, based on numbers, there was GeneCoin, based on DNA. Our DNA becomes a unique number, much like bitcoins. Our parents, "mine" us by giving birth. And each human becomes a "dollar". Then we would have inherent worth.

Have a short documentary here on the new debtor prison system. I'm still shocked we're going back to this, including our own state.

"This is the story of Hali Wood, a seventeen-year-old from Columbiana, Alabama who is deeply in debt to the private probation company, JCS. "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_cIWv9y…

Do you want ants? Cuz that's how you get ants.

One of the most remarkable things about watching Ta-Nehisi Coates's thinking on reparations unfold over the past four years (culminating in his recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly)has been discovering through him some of the great works of American history and the flabbergasting facts conveyed within.

For instance, in 1860, right before the Civil War, the capital value of slaves in America was greater than all the banks, all the factories, all the railroads combined. 16% of the accumulated wealth of the United States was human bodies; ten trillion dollars worth as a share of GDP. HALF of the total assets of the South was enslaved humans.

59% of US exports was cotton. That doesn't even include other slave-farmed crops like tobacco and rice, or all the other ways white Americans profited from slavery -- and not just in the North. Slaves didn't just magically appear here; they came on ships, and those ships had captains, and those captains built Newport, Rhode Island. Boston and New York were built on slave-trading and trading in slave goods -- Boston was the home of the American rum industry, built on the "triangular trade" that brought slaves to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

We are such a judgemental, moralizing people; we are accustomed to thinking about slavery, and every other thing in the world, in strictly manichean terms: it's "wrong" to own people. Sure, it's wrong -- but that leaves out most of the story. It's an economic system first and foremost. And it is fundamental to the existence of this country.

@5, slavery was not "a good deal" for America; it was an enormous economic asset for a certain class of people. A lot of other people believed it had to go -- abolitionism was the cumulation of an intellectual process that had been around as long as slavery itself. And it had become apparent by 1860 that slavery was going to split the nation apart, though there was some (unfounded) hope at the time that a literal split could be avoided. Obviously it could not. Fort Sumter was barely a month after Lincoln's inauguration.

I don't really understand what you're asking here, and I don't think you do either.