They were more like

Im sure people were more like... muh freedom rights

That is precisely how they viewed it

"Ending slavery? Do you know how much I spent on them?"

muh freedom > muh property

Don't conflate the US with the UK

Think about the pushback it would have caused if the government forcibly seized what was seen as property at the time

Their right to not have their property arbitrarily seized by the government was their primary form of freedom

In fact there were many court cases that because the UK was a place where slavery couldn't happen basically the judges ruled that if you brought a slave to the UK they became free.

Im not sure property is even the right term they would have used

I mean, chattel is more likely.

To refer to slaves? It absolutely is

Which is property.

chattel was always illegal in britain

Yup.

A fact that modern lefties ignore because they think American history is UK history.

Yes, but the britain based merchants with ledger books telling them they had 80 slaves on their distant plantation regarded those slaves as their lawful property

and they were until that law

it still doesnt matter anymore - nobody alive today owned slaves

Well the debt mattered

I like the way they frame the debt though

They frame it as debts to slave owners.

I mean I'm arguing that the state seizing property for moral reasons without compensation is not good ever for anything

Rather than a debt to free huge numbers of slaves peacefully.

When has that happened in history?

Rarely.

well pay the debt to the skeletons, there are no slaves alive today either

yeah but system11, we're talking about the compensation... which I had to pay taxes for before 2015

and you paid taxes too for it

It was a debt more likely to randos and foreign treasuries because they paid the owners off on the spot

who cares

we pay for our debts or we don't get to have them

i know, i think its ultimately pointless and incredibly unfair to the vast majority of people in the 'slave owning country' who were just working in factories or whatever and did not in any way own or benefit from slavery

I think the slave owners descendants who inherited their wealth should pay back the 2.4bn to the treasury 😛

I'm happy to have paid taxes for that. I'm happy to pay a share of a debt that lets me live in a society that found the actual just solution to the problem

and also I want a tax rebate 😛

Lol most of those slavers descendants were ravaged by estate taxes in WW1

they paid it back

don't fear that

I dont like the fact that Ive paid money to slave owners

at some point we have to stop trying to retrospectively fix things and just accept that the past is the past