L.A. Liberty

On Child Labor

freebroccoli:

arielnietzsche:

freebroccoli:

arielnietzsche:

>communism caused endless death

What is this then?

[Image]

oh wait, I cannot see this because I have the invisible hand.

What is it? Child labor? The practice that has been going on for millennia that capitalism only recently made society wealthy enough to live without?

So, according to you, a capitalist, child labour is human nature? LOL

Human nature is survival. Do you think that child labor was invented by capitalists? Do you really think that prior to the 1800’s, children just played all day, until those factory owners forced them to come to work?

The fact is that in non-industrialized societies, child labor is not a choice, it’s the means of survival. The child provides income for the family or someone starves. Whether that means selling newspapers or tending the animals or being a prostitute, children have always worked because that’s what you have to do to survive. Capitalism has made adult labor so valuable that it’s possible to feed a family on only the parent’s income(s), so child labor is no longer necessary.

In poorer countries, children are always the first ones who stop working when a family saves up enough capital to subsist without their offspring’s efforts. This means that, if you see a child working, it is almost guaranteed that his or her parents work full-time, too. It’s why you see families in countries like Colombia — whose capital accumulations have been unstabilized by drug cartels fueled by drug prohibition — putting their children back into the workforce. When these poor governments begin strictly enforcing laws against child labor, it does nothing but remove these children from safer environments in factories in the service industry and force them into 24-hour outdoor agriculture sectors (and, for young girls, prostitution).

I’ve linked to Clark Nardinelli’s “Child Labor and the Factory Acts” many times before. It’s a fantastic paper for individuals who are interested in looking into the subject of child labor. Children and their parents back then we’re begging for the chance to work in these factories you deem unsatisfactory. Leftists typically imagine that the alternative option to these children working at factories is sitting home with a television, a warm meal, and a loving mother. The real alternative is isolation in an empty house, no food on the table, and no opportunity to gain job skills for the future.

From what I see, the government is the only one specifically sanctioning child labor, as Jeffrey Tucker explains: “…there is one final exemption [in] federal law [which] allows states to allow kids to work for a state or local government at any age, and there are no hourly restrictions.” And what’s worse than forcing children into public schools through compulsory attendance laws with their bullying epidemics and brain-dead teachers?

Child labor disappears as the free market grows. This is just another case of the government taking credit for a trend that was occurring without its intervention.