As Adam Smith pointed out in his Wealth of Nations, “the experience of all agents and nations … [is] that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” The reason is “the slave consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible,” while the free worker has a self-interested stake in making it more productive, or any other trade he is engaged in, even at the most menial level—and production was at the heart and soul of the new capitalist order.
