First I assume you are talking about anarchy. Without a central authority to lay down the law, individuals can basically use three things to protect themselves against such abuses.
First, there is social ostracism. This is the expected outcome of behaving badly. It’s similar to the “customer is always right” mentality. If a business screws you, you avoid doing business with him. If someone commits a “crime” against you, you stop all contact with that person, and you advocate everyone else to do similarly. The more evidence you have of what actually transpired and the more sympathetic others are to your being slighted, the better such efforts will generally be. True, collective, complete ostracism is even better than jail. Jail will at least provide the person with food that they did not farm…
Without central authority, you can still have police and courts. In fact, you’re most likely to get choices in these regards. You may have to pay for them, but you are probably overpaying currently for your monopolized versions of these services. Courts would determine guilt and punishment and until compliance was reached that particular court would mandate social ostracism. It’s one thing to be pulled over and find out that the law was looking for you and having to go to jail. It’s another when you go to buy groceries and you are denied sale because you have not satisfied a popular court’s punishment.
Of course, this puts a lot of responsibility on society at large. They must verify which courts are the most supportive of what they believe to be justice. They must keep up with court decisions and identify ostracized individuals. As such, the most influential and wide-reaching courts will be the most expensive.
The second means of deterring crime would be to heavily protect yourself and your property to avoid such situations in the first place…another responsibility. If someone walks into your home or business and attempts to purposefully break your stuff, restrain them and throw them out. Use locks. There are no guarantees.
Finally, there is vigilante justice. If you can not generate social cooperation to prevent crime against you and you cannot deter it yourself, you may wish to organize your own band of thugs to punish those who are causing you anguish. In using such violence and force, you are subjecting yourself to evaluation by the rest of society, who may wish to ostracize you for unmerritted actions or revenge from the party you are using arms against.
Most people already do these types of things, although they don’t want such complete responsibility. As such, they tolerate some degree of state tyranny, assuming that it is either less harmful in total to society or less risky to random individuals. Although, if placed in an anarchic situation, people will naturally assume such rolls quicker than we would imagine. The problem most people have is that society is some unified structure, where some action at one end will be known by all other people. Being realistic, we don’t expect the police to find the guy who scratched our car or stole our hubcaps. In the same token, we can’t expect people to expend huge amounts of efforts policing crimes that very few people really care about.
As far as child labor goes, think about all labor. Life would be great if no one had to do any form of work. Too bad that’s fiction. Of course children shouldn’t be forced to be slave laborers, but once again…who should? The truth is this: 30% of Americans don’t graduate high school. Some who do can’t even read. Much less don’t graduate college. This leaves very little room for them in our job market. Most will end up in unskilled labor or learning some craft either on the job or through an inexpensive technical school.
So…rather than send children to school, paid by taxes, we could argue they’d be better off on welfare, working 1 day a week in some skilled profession as an apprentice or going to a technical school for 1 day a week. They’d have way more leisure time and actually learn a useful job skill.
Parents tend to love their kids. They don’t want them to slave away in a factory, and they want to provide them with high quality education so they can get high paying jobs. They want their kids to be leisurely and prosperous. But is it better for the child to go to a public school where he bearly learns how to read, or for the child works in a factory to supplement family income, which may help drive the family out of poverty, allowing them to wisely invest saved money in a family business, which the child can assume ownership over once reaching an adult age?
I don’t think we can “know” the answer to such questions. Statists tend to spare reality and responsibility for idealism and prejudice. They assume sending your kids to state-run school automatically makes them smart and qualified for jobs upon adulthood (esp state-provided jobs). They assume child labor is some spiralling addiction, leading to consequently greater child labor, rather than a means to lift a family from the unskilled working class.
Responsibility is taken from parents who should be the ones to decide these things. Most of those who crusade against such practices have no idea what it’s like to live in poverty. I will say that I don’t think orphans should be thrown into manual labor jobs. And I do think that children should be able to appeal their parents’ decisions to others in the case that the parents are attempting to exploit them. But these are rare cases compared to general child labor that generally do not break childrens’ backs.
AS FAR AS ANY 1800’S LABOR CONDITIONS GO, TELL THEM IT’S THE GD YEAR 2008. ASK THEM IF IT WOULD HAVE MADE SENSE TO THE LABORERS OF THE 1800’S THAT THEY NEEDED STATE RULES TO PREVENT 1600’S LABOR CONDITIONS. Labor conditions are not determined by rules → they are determined by reality. No one will work 16 hour days 7 days a week if they don’t need to. You could abolish every labor law on the books and you won’t have anything even somewhat resembling 1800’s labor conditions. They will always naturally improve in free markets, and even in many state-controlled ones that do not curb scientific and technological advancement. What statists fail to realize is that 400 years ago, the kids who didn’t labor didn’t survive.
Just make sure they realize it wasn’t simple rules and regulations that invented bronze hunting tools, developed agricultural technology, cured diseases, preserved food, or advanced science in general. Almost all of the things that bring progress away from the cruel nature of survival in a world of limited natural resources were created by free men and thought seeking to advance the prosperity of both themselves and all man. The state, on the other hand, perpetuates war, taxation, large-scale corruption, and waste.
Make sure these people realize that the only time that food has been purposefully allowed to rot without being consumed by the hungry is in our modern times backed by the power of our own government who have thrown men in jail for refusing to do so.