Cheap labor INHIBITS innovation - look at ancient Egypt and slave based civilizations.
The history of the US involves lots of people innovating ways to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce things. Why bother investing in capital equiptment and invention when you can reduce costs more easily by shifting production overseas?
As long as the Roman middle-class was strong, Rome was strong. When slave labor reduced what had been the middle class to consumers of bread and circuses, they had no longer any interest in fighting for Rome, and the barbarians took over
Walmart, the world's largest company store.
My candidate for the stupidest FR comment of the week.
Do you understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary? Between freedom and slavery? Cheap labor isn't coerced - it's the reason why tens of millions of formerly destitute people are now enjoying a standard of living that once unthinkable on such a scale. It was the engine that drove the Industrial Revolution - and as wealth was created, wages also rose, and workers were able to buy those things they first only helped to assemble - resulting in even more economic growth, better working conditions, and freer people. Read some basic Economics - Hayek, Friedman, von Mises, even Samuelson, for Pete's sake.
You've got a very good point there. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass describes how amazed he was at living standards in the North after he escaped from the plantation in the South where he was born and raised. Black laborers in New Bedford, Massachusetts -- who were not fully "free" in any sense of the word -- had a higher standard of living than most plantation owners in Maryland where he lived.