If there was no labor shortage, there would be no market for slaves

A few arguments: a) Demand is not always rational: People sometimes want crazy things, and sometimes do so for no apparent, clear reason. This should be clear from the fact that people are not always rational. If demand is not always rational then there will be some market for that demand assuming there hasn't been some serious external clamp-down and the free market is allowed to run its course. Of course, the demand could be small but it will still be there as long as the costs of acquiring those resources aren't too high. It follows from the idea that demand is not always rational that while we can perhaps take charts about supply and demand as expressing generalities, they should not be viewed as expressing a kind of exact precision. To get that degree of precision would presupposing a kind of uniform rationality in regard to the consumer and producer, which obviously doesn't exist in the real world. Unfortunately, my opponent demands this exact precision -- "there would be NO market for slaves" -- to make this case. Short of believing this standard we must vote Con. It is also apparent that most slave purchasers have been men, and from what we know about men, would it really be out of the question for a man to want a slave on account of, e.g., her really nice physical features? Such a purchase in the aforementioned case would not be driven by a cost-benefit labor analysis but rather on other, more subjective concerns. b) Even if there is no labor shortage, slave labor will often be cheaper than wage labor, especially if the people in charge are good at suppressing it. Here's a recent example from NY Daily News: "Meshael Alayban, 42, is accused of offering five women $1,600 per month to come work in America. When they arrived, she allegedly took their travel documents and made them clean and care for her for $200 per month. [1]" Luckily, the slaves were able to escape and seek legal protection. Otherwise, the $200/month is well below the market value for an assistant for a butler and by taking slavery she was able to undercut costs. c) Even if labor was really, really cheap and accessible people might very well still want slaves due to social considerations. For instance, in the Antebellum south holding slaves was a marker of social status. This was also true in ancient Rome, and has been so across history where slavery has occurred. We absolutely must examine the social forces operating to determine whether there would be a demand and can certainly not conclude so just on the basis of there being decent economic conditions for employers. tl;dr: A narrow focus in terms of what people want and what others are able to supply cannot concern itself solely with the labor market; this would fail to take into account what we know about humans and the human concern with issues outside of the economic sphere. Meta: Pro has a pretty big BOP, the claim essentially holds an "if X, then Y" structure and implies some kind of logical necessity. I think if we demand logical backing then it would be insurmountable, but this is Pro's problem. Even, however, if he establishes some kind of empirical backing we can still question whether the empirical backing will ALWAYS hold for ALL condition of there being no labor shortage. [1]http://www.nydailynews.com...