Houston Texans owner Bob McNair supposedly made a gaffe.



At a meeting of NFL officials earlier this month to discuss the protests, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said, “We can’t have inmates running the prison,” ESPN reported.

Troy Vincent, a former NFL player, responded to McNair, saying that his comment was offensive and that he did not feel like an “inmate” during his NFL career.

Why, oh why, would someone described as a team OWNER get the idea that the people he employed weren't free?

"...vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery."

– Cicero, De Officiis



"Nor is it to be wondered at that the standard of morals is not higher among us, that respect for the rights of property is not stronger. The power of life and death held over labor which says you shall work for me on my own terms or starve, is a source of crime, as well as poverty.

Weeds do not more naturally spring out of a manure pile than crime 'out of enforced destitution....

No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that sub-stitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper. He is between the upper and the nether millstones, and is hence ground to dust."

- Frederick Douglass

It does seem curious that a billionaire capitalist might think that he had some control over the people he employs.

After all, capitalism is all about freedom, right?

That's what I've been told.

For instance, when the alarm clock wakes you up in the morning so that you can go to work, isn't the first thing that pops into your mind, "Oh goody! I get to go practice freedom!"

Isn't freedom on your mind when your boss tells you what to do at work?

Or how to act? Or how to think?

Or when he tells you to piss in a cup?

We may never know why billionaire owner McNair talked about his employees as mere property, but you can be certain that he respects the people who's lives he controls.

And the same goes for all of our owners.

We are all totally free.

"It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live ... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune ... These men ... [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. ... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?"

- Simon Linguet