Are you receiving "spoils" if the government lets you engage in voluntary trade?

Why is a technology company's greater ability to hire immigrants who wish to live and work in the United States -- if such wider scope for mutually beneficial trade is what the immigration bill currently under consideration would enable -- being referred to by so pejorative a term as "spoils"?

Headline of a New York Times article: "Tech Pushes to Keep Its Spoils in Immigration Bill." The "spoils"? "[The bill] makes it easier for foreign students who get science and engineering degrees at American universities to get permanent residency, creates a new temporary visa for entrepreneurs, and in the most contested clause, vastly expands how many temporary contract workers can be brought into this country under so-called H-1B visas, while also raising the minimum wages they must be paid."

The primary dictionary definition of "spoils" is "booty, loot, or plunder taken in war or robbery." "Spoils" are not any kind of benefit gained from peaceful, voluntary trade. Nor can getting an okay from government to engage in peaceful, voluntary trade intelligibly be regarded as receiving "spoils."

The term is wrong whether we regard "spoils" as loot or, derivatively, as the payoffs of a successful political struggle a la "spoils of office." Either way, the Times author is using the term to refer, cynically, to any kind of gains gotten in consequence of the fight over immigration without regard to the essential nature of those gains.

The wealth earned by voluntary trade and productive effort is not loot of any kind and it is not a political plum. The wealth thus created belongs by right to the wealth-creator and those he pays in trade. This means that he did not acquire the wealth by raiding a nearby town or by out-lobbying others. Wealth that one earns by right is not morally tainted. To refer indiscriminately to the results of robbery, of politicking and of production by the same belittling term is to obscure key moral and other differences between these means of pursuing one's interests. It is also to obscure the difference between engaging in politics defensively, in order to protect one's rights, and engaging in politics in order to take by force what belongs by right to others.

Politicians should do only two things with respect to our peaceful economic life. First, abstain from interfering in what Robert Nozick called capitalist acts between consenting adults. Second, enforce protections of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the violence and fraud of criminals and governments.

When legislation forcibly transfers wealth from persons who earned it to persons who did not earn it, then we can talk legitimately, and accurately, about the "spoils" being conferred through that legislation by politicians doing the opposite of what they should.