If I find time during the next few days, I’ll address several of the excellent comments on my recent post on Wal-Mart and Slavery. In the meantime, I mention also my suspicion that slave-labor is less likely than is free labor to be used according to each worker’s comparative advantage. If my suspicion is correct, the division of labor within industrial factories, and across different manufacturing industries, will be less productive when labor is enslaved than when it is free.
I also draw your attention to the insightful Tim Worstall’s blog post that relates directly to this issue: slave owners don’t raise their slave-workers’ wages so significantly as this!
