James Edward Oglethorpe Quotes
Allowing slavery will starve the poor white laborer.
James Edward Oglethorpe Quoted in Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America 2016
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Indian and Black slaves were outlawed very early in Connecticut, not on moral grounds of concern for the Indians and Blacks, but because of the negative effects on the white poor. Why would anyone pay the poor any more than the amortization costs of a slave? Therefore there was no way a poor white could make a living wage if slavery were to coexist.
Downing was the brother-in-law of the Governor. Many people think that the Puritans were very moral people but they were not that so much as rigid. There was no moral compunction for example against slavery as this letter shows.
Modern slavery involved forced prostitution, child labor and various forms of indentured servitude together with importing illegal workers and threatening to have them deported if they complain or go public about their slave labor conditions.
Jefferson was one of the first political and economic thinkers to express concern over the “wage slave” concept of the industrial revolution. This was one of the major reasons that he was not in consonance with Alexander Hamilton in his economic vision for America. While we followed the Hamilton direction, there are still issues of maintaining freedom and independence for an employee in modern nations and economies.
Labor leader Samuel Gompers used this statement to publically praise the passage of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
Ruffin is more widely known as the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War.
This is not a common quotation from Thoreau. The great man for whom the establishment had so much respect had a very anti-capitalist streak. His view is that the employer will generally never pay his laborers a fair wage. Instead he will pay the laborer the lowest rate for which he can obtain the laborers services. If the laborer generates added value for his wage, the employer is in a zero sum game with the laborer. If part of the added value—the profit is paid to the laborer, the employer does not have it for himself (or his stockholders). In most cases, the laborer is forced to work for his and his family’s subsistence. This theory argues that they only way the laborer will get a fair wage is if there is a labor shortage (assuming no government laws or union pressure is in the picture. Many capitalists argue that a “fair” wage is what a free man is willing to work for and a free employer is willing to pay. So economics is like politics in general with respect to fairness—there is no universally accepted definition of what is fair.
James Edward Oglethorpe was a British soldier, Member of Parliament, and philanthropist, as well as the founder of the colony of Georgia in what was then British America. As a social reformer, he hoped to resettle Britain's worthy poor in the New World, initially focusing on those in debtors' prisons.
