Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
Because it wasn't theirs.

It is one thing for society to decide that slavery is not right and should be abolished. It is completely different to then simply take land from property owners who legally owned their land and distribute it to other people.

It would be as if the president emancipated your dog, and, despite the fact that owning your dog was legal yesterday, today the government decides to take half of your possessions and give them to the dog. It screams of banana republic politics.
That's a really creepy analogy to try to draw, as that's exactly the attitude the slave owners had to their "possessions", but your analogy wouldn't even be close to correct unless the dog was sapient and provided the labor that amounted for half of your possessions.

I'm aiming for precisely the analogy Beskar mentioned - the slavery situation was just a really cruel version of serfdom. The solution to serfdom is to grant full ownership to the land the serfs were already working. Why can't we do that for slaves? It is obvious that those who kept slaves should release them and be on the hook for providing for them, as the slaves provided for their masters previously.

One only needs to look South of the border.
Care to elaborate, because I don't know what you are referring to.

Quote Originally Posted by drone View Post
Look to Zimbabwe to see what happens when you split up a large working farm and give it to people that don't have the proper knowledge to run it. There is more to farming than dropping seeds in the ground and harvesting the results.
The situation there is quite different, as the confiscated farms were not given to people who had previously been working that land as slaves.