Slavery and The Free-Market System

“While it occasionally happened that a private slave owner [in the antebellum
U.S. South] killed his slave. .. socialist slavery in Eastern Europe resulted in the
murder of millions of civilians. Under private slave ownership the health and life expectancy of slaves generally increased. In the Soviet Empire healthcare standards steadily deteriorated and life expectancies actually declined in recent decades. The level of practical training and education of private slaves generally rose. That of socialist slaves fell. The rate of reproduction among privately owned slaves was positive. Among the slave populations of Eastern Europe it was generally negative.”

                       Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed.

The fundamental difference between free and slave labor is that freemen have an incentive to produce as much as possible. The slave, in contrast, will most likely perform the bare minimum necessary to avoid punishment. For this reason slave labor, as an institution, is inferior to an economy based on free labor---even from the point of view of the non-slaves.

But didn't it take the benevolence of the federal government to free the slaves? Yes. but only because other government ordinances had artificially maintained slavery in the antebellum South. [Another minor point: notice that it didn't take a bloody civil war anywhere outside the United States to free slaves; the institution faded away peacefully as capitalism swept the w0rld.]

Source: The PIG to Capitalism.