Laws forbidding teaching slaves to read and write 4. B. This had cache in the emerging industrial economies like the U.S. and Britain in the 19 th century. It remains a popular way of thinking about life for workers in the Third World. The fact that slaves have always had a positive price shows that this story is absurd on its face. Slaves have a positive price because slave-owners give them less than a free laborer's wage.
Free laborers capture the benefits of rising labor productivity for themselves.
Under slavery, in contrast, it is slave-owners who capture the benefits of rising labor productivity. E. Free workers also get to make their own trade-off between income and safety and comfort. When a master decides to send his slave to mine diamonds, he only maximizes his expected income. A free worker makes a trade-off between expected income and safety and comfort. If people were really concerned about exploitation in the Third World, they would allow them to immigrate to the First World.