Slavery in the US before the civil war didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were slaves in the south that didn’t consume anything, producing goods that in a large part were exported to britain. And the money from that was used to buy more slaves and land. But some of it was used to buy goods and expertise from the north that the slave economy was lacking, which in turn drove industrialization in the north.

But i stand by my point that over time the artificially low prices due to slave labor causes outflows of money from the rest of the world, depriving workers in other countries of money/wages and causing them to spend less. So all those slaves would overproduce things that there isn’t demand anymore and it’s still worse for the rich fucks than if they had paid slaves a fair wages.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying such a system can’t exist or work, just that in the long run it’s worse for everyone, even the rich who thrive on exploiting poor people.

Sadly the billionaire class don’t seem to understand this and there’s not much to do other than teaching them by force every 50-150 years.

Well, profitable in the short term. If the lowly peons don’t have money because you took it all, they cant spend it on stuff from your factories and your profit goes down and everything grinds to a halt. of course you can try to sell it to other countries, which fucks over their economies and makes them more susceptible to populism/facism (well after an initial phase of excitement over those sweet cheap imports) and then it’s facism all around and everyone is fucked. You just need to plan it well enough so you’re on your private island/mars colony with robot butlers by that point

I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there’s a sign “the glacier was here in 1910” and that’s where tourists back then.

To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there’s several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it’s really far away.

Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted…