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A comment on A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality. Parent comment

Re:A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality by paulddraper on Saturday January 02, 2016 @08:32PM (#10829046)
It's true that post Civil War blacks weren't doing well. (Actually, a lot of whites weren't doing well either.)

But it's a real stretch of the imagination to say the current United States (especially post income tax and Social Security entitlements) is anywhere even close to post Civil War circumstances.

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Re:A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality by hitekker on Saturday January 02, 2016 @08:45PM (#10829091)
His point was not about blacks, whites, or even the Civil War.

> Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person.

There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (chains, beatings, whips, rape), and "slaves" in the economic sense, but both are premised upon the unjust abrogation of freedom at the hands of another.

This article describes the latter case quite well:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-sla...

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Re:A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality by paulddraper on Saturday January 02, 2016 @10:16PM (#10829335)
The quote was from Frederick Douglass, a black man living during the Civil War.

Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.

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Re:A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality by PhasmaFelis on Tuesday January 05, 2016 @02:04AM (#10841752)
Comparing the lower class to real slaves was exactly and explicitly what he did do. Or are your scare quotes meant to imply that the modern lower class isn't a "real" lower class?
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