Paul Rosenberg – Very few things in human life are truly all or nothing. Almost everything works on a sliding scale, even slavery. The problem is, very few people have ever studied slavery, leaving them with a few emotional slogans instead of actual knowledge.
A Roman slave in a major city, for example, could start and run his own business, might be very rich, and might even become a major intellectual, like Epictetus. A Roman slave working in a mine… well… that was about as bad as it gets.
So, all-or-nothing representations of slavery are false and more often than not are propaganda. This being the case, a question sits in front of us: How enslaved are we? People sometimes get very upset over such questions, but not because they’re invalid. They get upset because they don’t want to confront such thoughts.
Believing that truth matters, however, I’ve decided to raise the question.
What Slavery Really Is
Slavery is a type of economic skim. It’s primarily an economic tool… surrounded by creative justifications, of course. A slave’s surplus (“profit” or “retained earnings”) is transferred to his or her owner. Physical control of the slave serves this purpose – to keep his or her surplus coming in. (We examined this in issue #32 of the subscription letter.)
So, if you keep all of your surplus, you are not at all economically enslaved. If you keep half of your surplus, you’re 50% economically enslaved.
Katherine Frisk – Is the human race a total, utter and complete lost cause? It deludes itself with lies at every turn. It creates illusions for itself to justify theft, greed, murder and slavery of its own species. The human race is mentally unbalanced and insane. It is beyond help. It is beyond rehabilitating.
Paul Craig Roberts – In 
Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.