Occupational Freedoms: Comparing Workers and Slaves

Abstract

It is commonly believed that wage workers are free to dispose of their labor, often established by comparing workers to slaves. Why compare workers to slaves, since the former were nearly always drawn from the ranks of self-employed persons; but that’s not a comparison we intend to pursue here. Instead, the plan is to revisit the comparison between workers and slaves by placing both in a laissez-faire economy without any intervention in labor markets. In this comparison, workers do not necessarily or always rank above slaves in occupational freedoms, and when they do, the margins of advantage are conditional or modest.