I’m hard pressed right now to imagine something more inflammatory than citing Frederick Douglass in an article seemingly decrying much of the existence of employment law.

I’m all for more flexibility, especially policies that could decouple the health insurance system from employment or ones that address the increasingly absurd divide between employees and independent contractors. But this article’s history lesson entirely glosses over the idea that exploitative labor practices ever existed, that it might be important to take even one sentence to understand how such contracts were used and abused in the past before rushing head first into a bold new freedom-filled future for workers and their bosses.