Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
This is the point I was making about labor mobility. In many economies this is impossible because there simply are no wage jobs. In the very common case where most of the economy is subsistence agriculture, if nobody other than your owner has any open land, there are no jobs to change to even if you were free. It's a less valuable right that you might think it is because of that. Many serfs actually *did* have the "right of departure". It didn't make them particularly free.
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Years ago I read an anthropological work that said, in effect, "free land, free labor, farm rent: choose two."