Now we find ourselves with overall fertility rates less than replacement. The children of the poor cost everyone a crap load of money to educate, and they often end up as shirtless antagonists on COPS or featured guests on Jerry Springer. Poor families often see both parents working just to get by and their children raised by strangers or television sets.
Let's face it; the experiment with child labor restrictions has failed. It is time to put kids back to work. Among the many social benefits of this change are the following:
- Some families will all get to work together as a team and spend more quality time together, perhaps in a mine or factory. Every day could be Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Many happy memories will be formed as parents teach their children and make work fun. Every day will be endless games of Find the Coal, or Dig the Most Coal, or Sew More Soccer Balls.
- Children will learn a trade and a work ethic rather than listening to bad music and wearing oversized trousers.
- Less money will be needed for public education.
- More children will be born.
- Productivity will increase, especially in mines where smaller children can be used to get into smaller spaces.
- The quality of American made soccer balls will increase as finer stitching becomes possible.
- Families will spend less on child care, and mothers will be able to reenter the labor market sooner.
There will be some losers:
- Bigots who hate reproduction by the poor.
- The education lobby because of competition between work and schooling.
- Lazy children who want to play on everyone else's dime.
- Child haters who do not want to see children liberated.
It is time to allow children their God given right to make a living, and not just on family farms or Chinese restaurants.
2 comments:
Yes, children and families might benefit, as will consumers, but aside from the utilitarian argument, there's also the simple ethical issue of freedom of association, freedom of contract, freedom from coercion ...
Knowing that the ethical argument falls on deaf ears, and knowing that your economic argument will fall flat as well, I think the main thing we need to do is expose people to the real history of child labor and child labor laws and try to undo some of that indoctrinational history that Big Labor gets the schools to teach instead. (An indoctrinational history that appeals to people's real decision making apparatus: emotion and symbolism.)
The main target has to be what people think they know about the Industrial Revolution ...
No doubt about it that folks deal with these issues on an emotional level. Some time ago, my wife and I visited her ancestral village in Shropshire (theme travel keeps us out of tourist havens) and went to the Ironbridge area where the Industrial Revolution got its start. The place is run as a museum of sorts of the Industrial Revolution with in depth tours of various industries. I never imagined that the history of iron smelting would be so fascinating.
In any event, there were no obligatory apologies for industrialists' having given folks economic opportunity, and the overall impression was that the experience was by and large liberating for people who would otherwise be stuck in some more or less feudal role.
Wherever children or women can work around the world, they are empowered, not abused.
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