Milton Friedman, in defense of sweatshops, from a 1972 Playboy Interview:

“PLAYBOY: Even if minimum-wage laws have been as counterproductive as you say, isn’t there a need for some government intervention on behalf of the poor? Laissez faire, after all, has long been synonymous with sweatshops and child labor—conditions that were eliminated only by social legislation.

FRIEDMAN: Sweatshops and child labor were conditions that resulted more from poverty than from laissez-faire economics. Wretched working conditions still exist in nations with all sorts of enlightened social legislation but where poverty is still extreme. We in the United States no longer suffer that kind of poverty because the free-enterprise system has allowed us to become wealthy.

Everybody does take the line that laissez faire is heartless. But when do you suppose we had the highest level of private charitable activity in this country? In the 19th century. That’s when we had the great movement toward private nonprofit hospitals. The missions abroad. The library movement. Even the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. That was also the era in which the ordinary man, the low-income man, achieved the greatest improvement in his standard of living and his status. During that period, millions of penniless immigrants came in from abroad, with nothing but their hands, and enjoyed an enormous rise in their standard of living.

My mother came to this country when she was 14 years old. She worked in a sweatshop as a seamstress, and it was only because there was such a sweatshop in which she could get a job that she was able to come to the U.S. But she didn’t stay in the sweatshop and neither did most of the others. It was a way station for them, and a far better one than anything available to them in the old country. And she never thought it was anything else. I must say that I find it slightly revolting that people sneer at a system that’s made it possible for them to sneer at it. If we’d had minimum-wage laws and all the other trappings of the welfare state in the 19th century, half the readers of Playboy would either not exist at all or be citizens of Poland, Hungary or some other country. And there would be no Playboy for them to read.”

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An Open Mind episode with Friedman, 1975: