Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure

In this book Lysander Spooner provides his view on causes of poverty in the USA and gives a legal cure to it. 'The existing poverty would be rapidly removed, and future poverty almost entirely prevented, a more equal distribution of property than now exists accomplished, and the aggregate wealth of society greatly increased, if the principles of natural law, and of our national and state constitutions generally, were adhered to by the judiciary in their decisions in regard to contracts.'

Lysander Spooner (1808 - 1887) was an American political philosopher, essayist, pamphlet writer, Unitarian, abolitionist, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He was a strong advocate of the labor movement and severely anti-authoritarian and individualist in his political views. Spooner's most famous writing includes the seminal abolitionist book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority which opposed treason charges against secessionists.