I view this blog as serving primarily two purposes. The first is to inform you about current events. Even as a teenager, I dreamed of being a syndicated columnist in newspapers. Art Buchwald, Pat Buchanan, George Will and others fed me a daily diet of commentary on the news and I loved the idea of being paid to spout off about things. The newspapers are gone along with the paid gig, but this blog is about as close to those columns as I'll get, I guess.
The second purpose is to push people to think, deeply, about assumptions so ingrained that it's shocking to think the assumption might not be correct. I've certainly changed my mind on some pretty big assumptions. So yesterday's post about what teenagers are prohibited from doing received some pushback: we don't want to go back to Charles Dickens and abusive child labor.
So here is the shocker for today: abusive child labor did not dissipate due to regulations; it dissipated due to cultural pressure, much of it generated by the superb writing of Charles Dickens (my favorite author, by the way). Cultures do change. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906 the public quit buying meat from the Big 7--enough for them to plead for Socialist Teddy Roosevelt to give them the Food Safety Inspection Service in 1908. Today, I can't sell a T-bone to a neighbor without exporting the beef from my county and re-importing it in packages, bathed in interstate diesel fuel and sans compostable innards.
In general, government solutions are a classic example of the cure being worse than the disease. This morning I got a wonderful quip from a friend who operates a small grocery store in New England. I'll quote him:
Here’s a funny one for you. We sell donuts at the store in packs of two. The container for them is clear and you can clearly see that there are two donuts in it. There’s a rule that we have to have a label that states the weight or volume of the donuts. We cannot waste time weighing each donut so our label says “2 donuts”. No kidding. The other donut rule is that if we offer donuts that are in a case and the customer has to ask for the donut, an ingredient label is not required, but if they are on the counter where they can just grab them, then they need an ingredient label.
What does this have to do with child labor laws? Everything. It's called mission creep. As soon as a government solution occurs, bureaucrats begin niggling and niggling until they've gone clear into outrageous territory. So here's the shocker: we should not have ANY government labor law requirements, or labeling requirements. No minimum wage, no worker's comp, no child labor laws: none, nada, nothing and no nutrition labels, ingredients, etc. MANDATED by government.
Will there be abuses? Absolutely. But what we have now is a generation of young people who grow up completely disengaged from the adult world and we wonder why they feel entitled, powerless, have low self-worth, and commit suicide. Self-worth comes from successfully completing meaningful tasks. It does not come from being proficient at playing video games or the number of likes on TikTok.
To the extent we've prohibited adult world interaction to our 12-year-olds, we've created a crisis generation coming up. People like Charles Dickens exposed the atrocities in his society in his time and it absolutely changed the cultural perception of what was acceptable. Upton Sinclair did the same thing. Rachel Carson did the same thing. The power of information to change a culture beats the power of tyranny to change a culture every single time. Never forget that.
Do not be impotent in the face of cultural atrocity. Be pro-active. Be empowered. Be engaged, informed, and aggressively promote a better approach. Defund the opposition. Instead of asking "how do I get my good food from good farming into supermarkets?" ask instead "why do we need supermarkets?" We need to unashamedly build a completely different cultural ethos. One that loves earthworms as much as Wall Street. One that promotes happy pigs over mere animal protein. One that honors the home kitchen more than 10,000 artificial food additives, heat 'n' eat, and shelf-stability.
So to those concerned I'm jumping off the cliff and advocating child abuse, have child labor laws and their concomitant mission creep yielded a more empowered child or a child in desperate need of purpose? The government's intervention is not the best or only bulwark against exploitation; the best is citizen empowerment through personal responsibility facilitated by lack of government nannying.
When did you first receive pay for working?
