Certainly not because they have such an intense compassion for their own laborers, that they are willing to rob everybody else, rich and poor, for their benefit.
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
gutenberg.org
Nobody will suspect them of being influenced by any such compassion as that.
But they advocate it solely because they put into their own pockets a very large portion certainly--probably three-fourths, I should judge--of the increased prices their commodities are thus made to bring in the market.
And all this is done at the instigation, and principally for the benefit, of the employers of home labor, and not for the benefit of home laborers themselves.
The pauper laborers (if there are any such) of other countries have just as good a right to live by their labor, and have an equal chance in our own markets, and in all the markets of the world, as have the pauper laborers, or any other…
Every human being has the same natural right to buy and sell, of and to, any and all other people in the world, as he has to buy and sell, of and to, the people of his own country.
And none but tyrants and robbers deny that right.
And they deny it for their own benefit solely, and not for the benefit of their laborers.
And if a man, in our own country--either from motives of profit to himself, or from motives of pity towards the pauper laborers of other countries--chooses to buy the products of the foreign pauper labor, rather than the products of the…
And for any government to forbid him to do so, or to obstruct his doing so, or to punish him for doing so, is a violation of his natural right of purchasing property of whom he pleases, and from such motives as he pleases.
To forbid our own people to buy in the best markets, is equivalent to forbidding them to sell the products of their own labor in the best markets; for they can buy the products of foreign labor, only by giving the products of their own…
If the authority be vested in the government, the governmnt is absolute, and the people have no liberties except such as the government sees fit to indulge them with.