Therefore the tax laid upon foreign commodities, that have been bought with the products of our home labor, is as much a robbery of the home laborer, as the same tax would have been, if laid directly upon the products of our home labor.
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.
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It is, at best, only a robbery of one home laborer--the producer of cotton, tobacco, grain, beef, pork, butter, or cheese--for the benefit of another home laborer--the producer of iron or woolen goods.
This policy of excluding foreign commodities from our markets, is a game that all other governments can play at, as well as our own.
This theory, then, is that, instead of permitting all mankind to supply each other's wants, by freely exchanging their respective products with each other, the government of each nation should rob the people of every other, by imposing…
In other words, the theory is, that the smaller the portion of the products of labor, that is given to the laborers, the larger will be the portion that will go into the pockets of the employers.
The laborers, who are paupers, or on the verge of pauperism--who are destitute, or on the verge of destitution--comprise (with their families) doubtless nine-tenths, probably nineteen-twentieths, of all the people on the globe.
But in those portions of Europe and the United States, where manufactures have been most extensively introduced, and where, by science and machinery, great wealth has been created, the laborers have been kept in the condition of wage…
It is, then, by the monopoly of land, and the monopoly of money, that more than a thousand millions of the earth's inhabitants--as savages, barbarians, and wage laborers--are kept in a state of destitution, or on the verge of destitution.
That is to say, they have it in their power, not only to elevate immensely the condition of the laboring classes in this country, but also to set an example that will be very rapidly followed in all other countries; and the result will be…
This they can do, by simply abolishing the monopoly of money.
The real producers of wealth, with few or no exceptions, will then be able to hire all the capital they need for their industries, and will do business for themselves.
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.