Like most Southerners before the Civil War or Greeks in ancient times I think some forms of unfreedom are possibly moral but chattle slavery is never really good in the moral sense. Nonetheless, there were good things about that institution. Here are twenty things that were wonderful about the institution of chattle slavery:
1. Governments could tax slave sales and develope a judicial system to control the worst abuses whereas today millions live and die in bondage completely outside the grasp and reach of the law.
2. For the millions exterminated, gratuitously tortured and starved to death in modern wars it would have created a value for a conquerors in those human lives as it did for African tribes for centuries but not in modern Rwanda, Darfur or the Holocaust.
3. It increases the capacity to apply labor to long term investments in infrastructure.
4.In many regimes it strenghtened the influence of wives and mothers in the ruling class.
5. It tended to difuse science and technology as it traveled with the slaves to the masters and as it was commanded and modeled from the masters to the slaves.
6. It allowed starving populations to recover with new investment and thinner populations instead of mass death.
7.It created a habit of valuing human populations as good and also recognizing the need to manage their resources.
8. It was a better alternative to prison for many offenders and for many cash- strapped jurisdictions.
9. It encouraged people to think more clearly about the value of freedom.
10. It bred in the master class a need to distinguish itself.
11. It worked in the best balanced socieities to create new free and semi-free socieities which balanced and bridged the slaves and the masters where war captives or imported aliens were slaves and made a future peaceful path of progress possible.
12. Slavery made it possible for the working slave classes to cooperate with less mutual hatred than the darkest and worst practices of most free socieities allow.
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