Let the Kids Work | Jeffrey A. Tucker - xpost /r/GoldAndBlack
fee.org/articles/let-the-kids-work/
fee.orgPosted Nov 14, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC
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fee.orgOkay, so here's how child labor ended in the USA: When the Great Depression sent the unemployment rate into the 25% range, children no longer had their primary economic advantage as laborers (being really cheap). Then, when the economy began to recover, FDR was able to threaten the Supreme Court into finally accepting federal labor laws, and the FLSA ended the practice.
You'll note that this is the opposite of the story amigo tells us: Incomes rose and so parents could afford to send their kids to school, and then we passed the Fair Labor Standards Act for no clear reason.
The reason why child labor began to be a significant political issue in the late-19th century was that it was drastically different from what had come before. Children have always worked in some form, but generally this was not on the same scale as industrial wage labor. Working 10-12 hours each day in a dark and dangerous factory was not conducive to education (which amigo evidently thinks really should be reserved for the elite), and it wasn't "exciting," excepting the possibility of losing a limb to the machinery.
That we also began, during the Victorian Era, to see childhood as something special and a little sacred also contributed to this, but I think it's the material difference in labor at the time that really changed things. By the 1930s, the enrollment rate for school-aged children was about 75%. In other words, child labor laws didn't really affect most children when they were passed (ed: you can be charitable and say that this was what the author meant by "the market destroyed child labor," but that would require several more steps to that argument, namely examining actual rates of child labor and how it operated). Rather, compulsory education and abolition of child labor was, in part, an attempt (and a largely successful one) to save the poorest children from illiteracy and being forced into low-wage, unskilled labor for life.
What libertarians and their ilk tend to do is say "Hey this regulation is needless" without really examining why we came to believe we needed that regulation in the first place. So here we see an article that doesn't give anything but the most cursory look at how child labor operated in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and why the vast majority of the populace came to believe that child labor should be banned (despite everyone "knowing" how wholesome and uplifting child labor really was).
It’s because their human right to work and earn has been violated for a good part of their lives
I love how the right wing uses "human right to work" in like the complete opposite of how most people would use it.
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What libertarians and their ilk tend to do is say "Hey this regulation is needless" without really examining why we came to believe we needed that regulation in the first place.
This is because, as a rule, libertarians believe that regulations are by their very nature a bad thing. The reasons behind the regulations are irrelevant. That's why you see stupid things like a suggestion that for each new regulation a lawmaker writes, they should repeal two (because obviously it's the number of regulations that matter. What they do is a non-issue. Fewer regulations is always superior to more regulations).
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Holy shit this guy just compared coal mining to playing a football game. WHAT IN THE FUCK!? I mean my god dude just come out and say you don't give a shit about other human beings. I can't even imagine making this point if you know it's wrong because no one will fall for it. That might literally be the stupidest thing I've ever heard and I went to public school in the south. WOW!
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these "scholars" will write articles to promote anything in exchange for kickbacks from companies / special interests.
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In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.
Snapshots:
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Subtitle: "Be very afraid"
Yes, I am, I am genuinely terrified that people actually believe this kind of thing
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They are being valued for what they do, which is to say being valued as people. They are earning money.
Because that's how you get valued as a person. It's all about your ability to earn money.
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For someone else.
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X-Post referenced from /r/goldandblack by u/Anenome5
Let the Kids Work | Jeffrey A. Tucker
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Wow, that motherfucker is straight-up delusional.
The market ended child labor, not the laws that outlawed it.
The market improved standards of living, not the combination of a social safety net and the fact that the entire world had been bombed into rubble during WW2.
He probably thinks the market abolished slavery, too.
The cotton gin removed the need for slavery. That's why the practice dropped off sharply in the early 19th century, and the slave trade was functionally eliminated by the time Abe Lincoln entered office.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case.
By European legislation prohibiting it.
Technically, that's just the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. US Domestic slave trade was unaffected... and yes, sarcastic.
The state prevented the market from ending slavery, specifically the fugitive slave act