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Bonus Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 570 of the final volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s indispensable trilogy on the essence and role of bourgeois values in modern life (original emphasis):

Nothing is served, though, by merging the idea of “poverty” with the idea of “slavery.”  The paid laborer, like the factory owner, is no slave, since he is paid in proportion to how well he serves other people.  Slaves are not.  A slave is “paid” in subsistence, if the owner reckons that it’s not good business to let him starve, but not in proportion to productivity.  Paid employment is the satisfying of other people in exchange for a wage.  Slavery by contrast is a violent extraction, not an exchange, and has nothing to do with pleasing anyone except the owner-by-violence of the product of another human being.

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