"I mean, worst case scenario, someone eats you, or keeps you around as a toy, or something, but it's not like laying down and starving to death is fun either. I think if I couldn't do anything I'd rather have someone who wanted to torture me for fun or use me for medical research or something than die. And maybe they can't work because they're temporarily sick and can't get a loan because they defaulted on some loans already but they could still get better. I don't understand how you would have a society without slavery?"

Wow. It's a very good thing he didn't land here while he was still working for Asmodeus. "I think they have difficulty with things like mining that are difficult for most races to do while maintaining good health but I don't think they fail to be a society."

"No incompetents with powerful enough magic to cause problems?"

"...there are several ways I could answer that and I don't know which ones will most illustrate my confusion about how you put it. Becoming a powerful spellcaster requires surviving dangerous situations repeatedly in a way that particularly witless individuals tend not to survive. Enslaving a powerful person would be difficult and dangerous by comparison to enslaving a weak one who can still do mining labor. Golarion has many problems and some of them are caused by powerful spellcasters."

"...What do you do about the powerful spellcasters that cause problems?"

"Fight them. Or come to difficult detentes with them."

"Huh. Okay."

"What's happening here instead of that?"

"Everyone who can’t or reliably won’t follow the law is enslaved or killed."

"But... if someone is very powerful... how do you cause the part where they listen to what you tell them to do."

"Oh. Magic. I guess you don’t have command magic?"

"There are enchantments that can add magical force to commands. They work less well on powerful people. Everything does."

"...I don’t think we have people who are more powerful than other people? If someone is protected from command magic we kill them and if someone is protected from that too we pen them in as small a space as we can manage and eventually we throw their oubliette into the sea or bury it or something."

"Oh. On Golarion we have people who are more powerful than other people."

"How does that... work?"

"For most people most of the time, they are not powerful at all. Someone with some talent to leverage, and some luck or strategy or divine grace or friends or some other supportive circumstance to help them live through applying it, can practice and develop their talent and use it in dangerous and high-stakes situations that are challenging at their current level of power. This most commonly takes the form of fighting monsters of some kind. I developed almost all of my power fighting demons at the Worldwound. In very broad strokes the three kinds of power people can develop, singly or in combination, are martial skill, arcane magic, and divine magic. I'm a divine caster because my spells come from my god. Gods can skip the developing talent in dangerous situations step, but it is vanishingly rare, generally they mark someone with their approval by giving them one circle of spells and the rest grows in like anyone else's."

"Weird. I guess then you wouldn't have random idiots with the ability to turn everyone in town into a statue."

"That's sixth circle and even people who can cast the spell can only do it a few times a day unless they spent a lot of time and money on advance preparation of magic items to help them with it. If a sixth circle wizard did decide to go around turning people into statues then how quickly they were stopped would depend on who they chose to target but they'd eventually get attention from a government, or a sixth-circle adventuring party looking for a justifiable fight, or maybe a dragon or something. Though probably none of those would then spend the same number of scarce spells on reversing all the petrifications except of particularly important people; that's the same slot that you need to raise the conventionally dead."

"I see how you have a society without slavery, I guess."

"It's still not really clear to me how the slavery helps. I mean, slavery exists, but it doesn't help with this kind of thing at all unless it's very indirect."

"You use magic to make them not do anything you don’t want them to. Since they’re not more powerful than you."

"But you don't do that to everyone, so someone could start causing problems."

"I mean, yeah? But they’d better not figure they can keep causing problems, and anyway they wouldn’t be set free to begin with if it didn’t seem like they could follow laws. Or at least that’s illegal. - Nobody starts free." 

"...ah."

"Come to think of it, how do your children not get themselves killed even without magic?"