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Philip Hand's avatar

I'm just eternally suspicious of Just So reasoning:"...forager era...mobs...informally...consensus...known failure modes...law as a partial replacement...plausible..."It is plausible. But so are many stories. I certainly think that this is a reasonable way to start thinking about law. But you'd have to get loads of evidence if you wanted to do any reasoning *from* this point.And the last point is just tendentious. There is no reason other than the author's own biases to suppose that systems of law systematically trending towards milder punishments (which I agree is the trend) are because of some desire to look good, rather than a desire to inflict less punishment. That's not even a plausible Just So story.

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TGGP's avatar

Prisoners are exempt from the 13th amendment, they can be made to work without pay (although the modern US economy is less geared toward such very cheap labor). Slaves in the US were SOMETIMES paid, and a small number were able to buy their freedom that way, but when slavery was abolished and many of them stayed on the same land as sharecroppers, their total compensation went significantly up (even with restrictions on headhunters giving them other options and other laws designed to reduce their pay). In a Malthusian situation all laborers are just paid enough to keep the population stable (near subsistence levels) and it doesn't matter whether they are slaves/serfs or renting land, but America since colonization has never been Malthusian.

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