r those who fear for good reason that they will not be able to find secure paid employment. This new institution of slavery would be regulated so as to impose obligations of adequate slave maintenance on the owners. Slaves would have some basic rights - rights to food, lodging and medical care for themselves and any dependants. Of course, slave-owners would receive child support payments that enslaved parents would have received, and could receive a subsidy for including their slaves in a comprehensive private health insurance policy. Slave-owners who were still unable to meet their obligations would be able to sell their slaves in regulated slave markets to other reputable owners. Slave markets would be the mechanism guaranteeing slaves lifelong security, even if their owners become insolvent. Of course, after the initial free choice the new slavery would still be similar in crucial respects to older forms of the institution. Runaway slaves would be lawbreakers who could be hunted down and returned to their owners. Recalcitrant slaves could be summarily punished by their owners.The Benefits.The primary benefit of the reintroduction of slavery would be to solve, very largely, the problems of long-term unemployment and socially-excluded underclasses. At a stroke the cost of absorbing the unemployed into useful work would be cut to the bare minimum. At the moment one of the main barriers to full-employment is the high cost to employers of wage labour - costs that include paid holidays, sick leave, superannuation contributions, the expense of meeting occupational health and safety standards, and much more besides. Employers have moaned for years that they would employ more people if only the cost of doing so were not so high. Slaves would obviously be much cheaper than waged workers. They would be less expensive to maintain than dependant teenagers (for they would not need to be expensively educated) or a dependant spouse. So the super-ric...
