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"Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave." William Cobbett, English political commentator, 1827.

Many people in the world today, particularly Americans and Englishmen, would be deeply insulted if it were to be pointed out that, to the extent that they lack direct and effective ownership of the means of production, they are slaves. As far back as Aristotle, however, a nominally free human being who worked for another for wages - regardless how high or low the wage level might be - was considered a slave to the degree that he or she depended on another individual for that income. The wage-worker was, in fact, a "wage slave," a term that antedated Karl Marx's anti-property rhetoric by millennia, and was explained in Aristotle's Politics.

The condition of dependency, not objective legal status, was what determined for Aristotle and Cobbett whether or not someone was a slave. A human being can be freed from involuntary servitude by the stroke of a pen on an emancipation proclamation or manumission certificate, but freedom from economic dependency is another matter altogether. Ending that kind of slavery - always the most widespread and becoming more common every day - requires a restructuring of the entire social order so as to open up democratic access to the means of acquiring private property so that anyone who wants can become an owner.

Should, however, all slavery be abolished? If we believe either capitalists or socialists, absolutely not. For the capitalist, the small wealthy class of owners is necessary to be able to reinvest unconsumed income, thereby creating jobs so that the vast numbers of wage slaves can continue to exist. For the socialist, all ownership should be vested in the State, and everyone be held in a condition of wage slavery to the State. The only difference between capitalism and socialism for the wage worker in economic servitude is that he or she has a chance to change the heart of the private capitalist, but none at all of trying to get anything out of a faceless State bureaucracy.

Further - believe it or not - there is even a form of slavery that continues to exist legally, believed by many people to confer distinct benefits on society, even on the slave.

To understand this, we

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