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Pragmatic Villainy: Difference between revisions
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* This is common among [[The Empire|empires]] who will often protect the peasants in their domain from robbers-because someone has to pay taxes after all.
**One Roman emperor regularly chided his Procurators,"Sheer the sheep, don't slaughter them", meaning if you charge to much in taxes your subjects will be destitute next year and there will be no more revenue. Not all Emperors had that much good sense and at many times in Roman history the government treated the people like a strangler vine treats a tree.
* Religious freedom (as opposed to governmental indifference) did not at first begin as a high-minded belief in the dignity of man or his right to make his own mistakes or whatever. It began when the rulers of Europe realized that while having theological debates in a Seminary was fun for those with a bent that way, doing it with musket balls was getting
* Abolitionism was a zig-zag. It was popular as early as the eighteenth century, and traces of it are found in the Christian Middle Ages: some [[Your Mileage May Vary|might argue]] that there were hints of it even before. But it did not come to fruition until the Commercial and Industrial revolutions made voluntary labor more profitable anyway. On the other hand a lot of abolitionists had no gain and considerable sacrifice for it. And of course slavery is not really going away so long as someone is tempted to get free labor and strong enough to carry out his desire. It has been pushed out of respectable society into being the mark of criminality or barbarism at least. But it has to be admitted that a large part of the reason is that it is less practical economically.
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