It seems as disturbing to me as it apparently does to you, but it was recently in the news that the UK actually did a buyout when they abolished slavery. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britains-colo...

It's a tricky situation, philosophically. This may have helped the UK abolish slavery sooner (a good outcome), but its morally and legally dubious.

This was suggested many times during the lead-up to the Civil War, but (I think rightly) Lincoln as well as the more hard-core abolitionists viewed this strategy as contradicting their position that Slavery was a crime against Natural Law.

Lincoln's strategy required the forced labor (and for some, subsequent deaths) of tens of thousands of people. The irony of conscription wasn't lost on Americans at the time either, and the military drafts were extremely unpopular on both sides.

Lincoln's strategy itself was "required* because slave-owners and slave-owning states would not give up their slaves without a fight. Blame them, not Lincoln.

Lincoln himself was well aware of the costs that would be imposed by war, but chose this course of action due to the absurdly perverse nature of slavery.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

I don't doubt that Lincoln personally resolved his internal ethical dilemmas, but I do doubt that this would be any consolation to me if I were forced to fight in an army.

As satisfying as it might seem to just shoot the slaveholding bastards instead, that ends up being even worse in humanitarian terms.

You are aware, that the first slave owner in Virginia, who went to court over his slave, was a black man, right?

How does that change anything I wrote? White slaveholders held white slaves in ancient Rome but it would have been justified to kill them all as well, too.

"How might you propose to compensate people who, in good faith, bought other people"

Seriously? You're making that comparison?

I'm comparing the logic, not the gravity of the situations.

You had pointed out (rightly) that purchasing and holding medallions is legal, and those who bought them did so with the understanding that they would profit. At the same time, they must have observed that the very existence of the medallion system limited the freedom of others. Some might have even genuinely viewed this as altruistic.

All that was true of slaveowners and slaves.

Driving taxis isn't a crime against humanity.

Your argument is that requiring medallions to drive a taxi (which I agree has become an inefficient and slightly corrupt situation) is in any way comparable to slavery is an insult to anybody who's ever read any history.

> Driving taxis isn't a crime against humanity

The problem here isn't some people "driving taxis", its that these people, and organizations associated with them, lobbied for and bought into a system that prevents, by force of government, anyone else from driving taxis.

And of course, even that is not a crime against humanity. If it was, I'd be advocating the use of military intervention if it was serious enough, such as in the case of mass slavery or genocide. All I'm saying is that if/when we get rid of this system, we don't need to compensate medallion owners.

That's a valid argument (I think some token compensation is fair, but can totally see both sides).

But if you interlaced every other word with 'fuck' and questioning the sexuality of other posters, you couldn't expect to be judged on the merits of your argument. Personally (others may disagree), I see totally unnecessary comparisons to slavery the same way.

I prefer making the comparison to dodging it.

It's like godwin's law squared. Maybe because I'm american or maybe because the hitler comparison is cliche, but I'm more insulted by spurious comparison to a slave-owner than I am to Hitler.

You have every right to be offended or insulted.

But it makes no difference to the validity of the argument presented.

Well the argument is clearly invalid. Slave owners??

But there's a difference between lousy analogies that further debate through clarification and lousy analogies that lead to everyone telling each other fuck you.

I had no intention of offending you, or the poster, and if that is how it was taken, I apologize.

The poster was concerned about potential losses incurred by existing medallion owners if the law changed. The comparison was made to point out that laws are often wrong, sometimes more seriously wrong (as with slavery or genocide), sometimes less wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

Individuals or classes who benefit from bad laws should not get an affirmative right to recover losses incurred when these laws are changed. In the most serious cases like slavery or genocide, they may even be punished ex post facto for following such laws. I'm obviously not advocating that here, only that the law be changed through the democratic process, despite the potential effects on existing medallion owners.