I should have made it clear - I was talking specifically about reducing economical risk by turning over your fate to a slave owner. The elevated risk to personal security is obviously a downside as you pointed out, although a sane slave-owner will never kill you because he has already paid for all your future work. In addition slave will forever forgo all chances of climbing out of that hole because he does not keep any of the surplus product he has generated. And hence my point is that someone seeking to reduce their exposure to risk can easily end up subjecting himself to a different risk he didn't think about.

The parallel with employment is direct - by trading your economic liberty for a paycheck you are reducing your exposure to risk of there being nothing to eat. However you are also eliminating your exposure to the upside of your work. You are also picking up the risk of having loaded on debt and then being laid off, ending up in a dead-end career and work-place hazards.

What Seth points out is that risk of there being nothing to eat is vastly exaggerated in our minds, thus many of us trade the very real upside of our labor for the risk-protection we didn't need.