There are slaves in the united states today. Currently the minimum wage is so low in comparison to the cost of living that those who earn it can only afford to pay for a place to live, food, and clothes at times. These people feel that they have a choice in what they spend there money on, but really they don't. They have just as much choice of what they spend there money on as a slave has choice of weather or not he has a place to sleep at night. Those who are forced into this life at 18 with no family, and no friends have almost no hope for ever being any better. They cant afford to have friends. If they chose to have friends some of the money they spent on living in their apartment, buying clothes, or buying food would have to be spent on doing things with friends. But an apartment, clothes, and food aren't things which a person can decide to go short on.
MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS
If you were to look at the average life of a slave they would live in the safety bracket. If you look at the average person earning minimum wage today they would be in the exact same bracket. One is given money from the employer, when one receives money they feel that they are free to go waste it all if they want. They always have the freedom to not spend the money on rent, clothes, or food, but by doing this they will be dropping the physiological bracket out of under themselves. Soon this person would find there life crumbling under their feet and would be forced to enter the world of working for the bare minimum again. Because of this dilemma one does not go spend his hard earned cash on whatever they want. They receive their pay check, and use all of it to pay for the same things as a slave would be given. There is no choice of weather one will pay for this or not.
The People in the top bracket of America make this worse by constantly forcing the cultural ideal that a person who is happy has lots of expensive things and in order for a person to have friends one needs to spend money on those friends. Because this is forced on us we feel that we cant be happy unless we spend all of our money on things which are "nice" or "expensive". It gets us in a never ending work, spend, spend, debt. once one ends up in the debt stage they feel stressed inside, after the stress builds up they work harder so they can get out of debt, once the work pays off and one earns a promotion they feel that it is "OK" to gain just a small amount more debt. This is a way of rewarding ourselves so that we can feel OK about the hard work and so they can keep Their esteem. This cycle will continue running in circles for the rest of a persons life, and as the media forces more and more ideals down our throat in the form of movies, TV, advertising, news and corporate sponsored forms of entertainment, we are caught. We are slaves, they run us.
Those in the upper class make such a preposterous amount more money than those in the lower class that they can use a small amount of that money to study the spending habits of us, study us so much that they can learn how to indefinitely hold us in our state of slavery, but because we technically can escape if we "really try" we aren't considered slaves and what they do is just fine and dandy.
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