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I am of course interested in the idea for my timeline, or at least a move toward abolition or more restricted/regulated slavery. Obviously slavery had some very damaging effects on the economy in terms of putting regular free citizens out of work and making them reliant on state welfare, and the brief discussions on the forum that I have read thus far don't really offer any reasons why this couldn't happen beyond "you need people to do jobs others won't do"... which kind of stinks of modern Leftist arguments in favor of mass immigration.


One argument I read acknowledged that gold and silver miners were among the highest paid jobs in the 19th century and then in the very same paragraph turned around and said that you wouldn't be able to pay people enough in Ancient Rome to do the same work... why? lol. I understand fully that especially by the time of my timeline, slavery is a very integral part of the Roman economy, especially with more than a million people in the city of Rome having grown accustomed to state welfare, but this problem had its critics at the time (Pliny comes to mind), and so I am interested in exploring how it might be alleviated. Obviously, slavery is much cheaper, at least in theory, than paying for labor. But the most damaging consequence of long term slavery in an economy in my mind is that it puts regular people out of work, thereby squeezing business owners with ever increasing taxes to meet the burden of state welfare (and entertainment) brought about by the lack of work, which decreases productivity as you have a growing population of welfare recipients.


As we have seen, and as writers of the time observed, this is very, very bad.
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