I often debate my friends’ casual (naive?) suggestions that the state control commerce, fight the war on drugs, and bailout incompetent companies. I argue, as Bastiat does in The Law, that government is our collective defense of life, liberty and property, and that whatever government does beyond this mandate is offensive to both freedom and prosperity because government must take from one to do for another.
When my friends give ground in the debate, they usually do so grudgingly, retreating to the sacred cows of statists – public education, public transportation, pollution laws and child labor laws.
There is much to be said about each of these. Below, I excerpt a couple of articles from mises.org regarding child labor laws.
The first is a long list of snippets from the Child Labor Amendment Debate in the 1920s.
The Trouble With Child Labor Laws
“Let’s say you want your computer fixed or your software explained. You can shell out big bucks to the Geek Squad, or you can ask – but you can’t hire – a typical teenager, or even a preteen. Their experience with computers and the online world is vastly superior to that of most people over the age of 30. From the point of view of online technology, it is the young who rule. And yet they are professionally powerless: they are forbidden by law from earning wages from their expertise.
Might these folks have something to offer the workplace? And might the young benefit from a bit of early work experience, too? Perhaps – but we’ll never know, thanks to antiquated federal, state, and local laws that make it a crime to hire a kid.
Pop culture accepts these laws as a normal part of national life, a means to forestall a Dickensian nightmare of sweat shops and the capitalist exploitation of children. It’s time we rid ourselves of images of children tied to rug looms in the developing world. The kids I’m talking about are one of the most courted of all consumer sectors. Society wants them to consume, but law forbids them to produce.
You might be surprised to know that the laws against ‘child labor’ do not date from the 18th century. Indeed, the national law against child labor didn’t pass until the Great Depression – in 1938, with the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was the same law that gave us a minimum wage and defined what constitutes full-time and part-time work. It was a handy way to raise wages and lower the unemployment rate: simply define whole sectors of the potential workforce as unemployable.
By the time this legislation passed, however, it was mostly a symbol, a classic case of Washington chasing a trend in order to take credit for it. Youth labor was expected in the 17th and 18th centuries – even welcome, since remunerative work opportunities were newly present. But as prosperity grew with the advance of commerce, more kids left the workforce. By 1930, only 6.4 percent of kids between the ages of 10 and 15 were actually employed, and 3 out of 4 of those were in agriculture.
In wealthier, urban, industrialized areas, child labor was largely gone, as more and more kids were being schooled. Cultural factors were important here, but the most important consideration was economic. More developed economies permit parents to ‘purchase’ their children’s education out of the family’s surplus income – if only by foregoing what would otherwise be their earnings.
The law itself, then, forestalled no nightmare, nor did it impose one. In those days, there was rising confidence that education was the key to saving the youth of America. Stay in school, get a degree or two, and you would be fixed up for life. Of course, that was before academic standards slipped further and further, and schools themselves began to function as a national child-sitting service.” (Read more from mises.org)
The Child Labor Amendment Debate of the 1920s
“Few causes are so shrouded in sanctimonious mist as the movement, early in the twentieth century, to abolish child labor. Sympathetic journalists and historians dubbed it ‘the crusade for the children’ and depicted its foes as avaricious manufacturers.
Some self-styled ‘child savers,’ especially the women novelists and inveterate reformers of New England, were sincerely concerned about exploited children. Others, however, intended to reconstruct the family and install ‘government as overparent,’ to use the words of Colorado Judge Ben Lindsey. Opponents of the Child Labor Amendment, far from being the calloused plutocrats of legend, included noted Progressives, urban Catholics, and thousands of farm families.
The fight over the amendment highlighted the growing breach between those loyal to Jeffersonian America and those who sought to concentrate power in the grandest overparent, Washington, D.C.
. . . .
Here you are, a Jeffersonian Democrat, the cardinal principle of which doctrine was the integrity of the states, urging me, a Hamiltonian Republican, to support a constitutional amendment enabling the national government to deal with the children of the states. Strange times, these are. But I think I can encourage you to expect favorable action, as the women always get nowadays what they ask for. – Senator William Borah (RID)
to a constituent, 1924:
[A] communistic effort to nationalize children, making them primarily responsible to the government instead of to their parents. It strikes at the home. It appears to be a definite positive plan to destroy the Republic and substitute a social democracy. – Clarence E. Martin, President American Bar Association” (Read more from mises.org)