A slave is an adult dependent. Someone who can't get his shit together enough to provide for himself without another person telling him what to do and without preying on others. There is absolutely nothing you can do to change a natural slave into a natural freeman. You can free slaves, and in 10 years they will all be back in slavery. You can enslave the free, and in a generation they will have bought themselves out.

I'd estimate 40-50% of Americans (and 90% of American blacks) are natural slaves in Aristotle's sense of the term:

Most of the conditions of the existence of American slaves were and are driven by technological and economic factors. If the economy is driven by the need to clear old growth forest with hand tools, or farm cash crops with 18th century technology, you're going to have a lot of people spending their lives in very hard labor, one way or another. I am sure that if most slaves had had the ability to be more productive in other occupations, their masters would have ensured their employment in those occupations out of a profit motive if nothing else. In fact, the existence of a whole class of freedmen and their descendants suggests that this is what happened.

If the economy is driven by printing the world's reserve currency and controlling the flow of global commerce across the oceans, you're going to have a lot of slaves playing video games and snorting Oxycontins. A slave whose master doesn't give him any instructions or require him to work is no less a slave; he may even be worse off as a person (as is evidenced by the fact that the slaves of the 19th century seemed to be far less degenerate than their modern descendants).

The Civil War and the following century didn't free the black slaves but rather nationalized them, with two intermediate phases: a sharecropping one, where the slaves worked in their old occupation for the same subsistence pay but without a requirement for their masters to take care of them when they got old or sick, and an industrial one (the Great Migration), when they were brought up to the industrial cities of the North to be used as strikebreaking labor (for instance, Ford's dealings with the black ministers of Chicago).

So, here we are. The slaves of America are no longer owned by private individuals but by the bureaucratic government. They no longer have gainful employment, their functions having been reduced to vote blocks, mascots, and endangered species predators. An individual master may be cruel or kind. He may be abusive or fair. He may be honorable or craven. He lives with his slaves as one does with family members or livestock. Most people do not treat their family members or working animals cruelly, for personal reasons or due to community pressure.

But America's modern slave owning apparatus, consisting of teachers, social workers, cops, prison guards, etc., can only be cruel, abusive and craven. Each one is absolved of responsibility, subject to bureaucratic rigamarole, and is doing his or her job. It is better to be a bum's dog than to be in a state-run dog shelter.

Given that slavery is an institution whose existence is driven by a fact of human nature, it is better to figure out how to have a good, productive slavery than excoriating its existence.