[scotttrinh]

You're kind of agreeing with my point here. I'm saying that tempering evil with the state is a legitimate use of the state apparatus. That shouldn't be construed as thinking that the state can actually fix the underlying cause (abolition did not fix the problem of Race in America for instance), but it can mitigate the suffering of some, and shouldn't be totally discounted.

Beyond that, from my perspective, slavery in America was ended despite the best efforts of the government to keep it going. It's probably just semantic differences between us that make this non-obvious, but I would argue that the state made it harder to eradicate slavery than if it wouldn't have existed, or was less all-powerful. At least in North America, slavery was a result of state-sponsored colonization and state-granted charters and monopolies, not private industry. The history of British colonization of North America is not a history of private social movements, but of politics and the expansion of Empire across the globe.

At the base of this disagreement, I feel it is a mistake to conflate law with the state, and that conflation is the reason we see the state as a benefactor or positive force in the world. Because they force their own monopoly in law, they are seen as being the same as law, but law has existed and still exists outside of the modern state.