Child Labor Laws!

Economics Political Theory
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Apparently my friends’ best argument against Ron Paul is “yeah, all we need is a president who would bring back child labor.”

I’d like to see some of your thoughts on the matter of child labor (specifically Industrial Revolution era child labor) - the reasons behind its existence, the factors that drove it to continue to exist, and whether it would flourish today if we removed child labor laws.

My general understanding of mainstream history is that there once existed a time before the industrial revolution, and then BAM - industrial revolution and child labor and children working in dangerous factories and coal mines and exploitation.

From what I understand, the libertarian response is that the mainstream misses the context and alternatives. Here is what I have seen supports the free market side of things:

  • Pre-industrial life wasn’t all roses and ice cream: agricultural life was tough, physically demanding, and dangerous. People were starving - as were children. Oftentimes, it was better to send the child to the factory than to have him starve at home. Indeed, if parents sent them there, then it was better (otherwise there’d be no point to it).

  • Most of the child labor left before the national anti-child labor law was agricultural, and a tiny amount of that at that.

  • Child labor was a “phase” of development which the west need not experience again in the present day (citation and explanation needed)

Knowing this, I’d like to strengthen the case with more evidence, and I have some ideas for potential ideas to explore:

  1. Child mortality - of course, statistics should not be one of our main resorts, but I’d like to look at child mortality before and after the industrial revolution. It’s likely that all the factors can’t be controlled, but I’d imagine that (according to the (right-) libertarian theory) sending children to factories led to a decrease of deaths among children. Hence, though the factory conditions were indeed initially quite poor compared to our standards of today, they were better than agriculture.

Hence - I’d like a chart of the child mortality rates over time (and again, I recognize that this doesn’t prove anything for either side). If possible, it’d be nice if there were some non-statistical evidence for a shift in types of work resulting in a decline in overall accidents.

  1. The parent-child relationship - libertarians make claims that parents didn’t merely sell off their children in the 19th century for pure greed, but because of necessity. However, from my scant understanding of social structure, the parent-child relationship was not once what it is today - children were not revered and treated like a crystal chandelier. Any comment?

  2. Enclosure et al - Some libertarians rightly point out that in many cases people choose workshops not purely out of their choice, but because they were forced off of their land. This could very well be the case in some Asian countries in times closer to the present. Furthermore, as Tucker points out in his description of the four monopolies, government owned unowned land (yeah, that’s how I decided to word it), which means that there was not a free market as right-libs define it.

What throws a wrench in this idea is Carson’s claim that the Enclosure movement led to people being pushed off of their land. He explains his arguments in the comments of this article:

I would argue, though, that the conditions under which “free” labor children “chose” factory labor reflected pressures similar in kind (if more indirect and in lesser degree) to those faced by those subject to the poor laws. The important question is, why the parents “chose” to send their children to the factories, why they needed the extra income, and why they found the factory alternative attractive. The answer lies, I think, in several centuries of prior history: the enclosure of the open fields, the nullification of copyhold and other traditional land tenure rights, and Parliamentary Enclosure of commons. You can throw in, for good measure, the restrictions on economic freedom entailed in the Combination Laws (enforcement of the Combination Laws was completely ungoverned by common law standards of due process) and various police state provisions in force from ca. 1790 to 1820. The entire working class of Britain, as described by the Hammonds, amounted to a population under military occupation.

The argument appears to be that the Enclosure movement led to a decrease in choices for people through violation of rights.

I am not very well-versed on the Enclosure movement and its analysis through a right-lib viewpoint. There are a few things that I can think of off the top of my head with just the info I know:

  • Enclosures likely favored some landed elite in a way our that our “idealized” free market wouldn’t

  • People who grazed their animals there may have had easements to the grass (brings up the question of homesteading - when is it property and when is it simply an easement?)

  • Even if the Enclosure movement itself was perfectly fine according to right-lib property rights, not having the enclosures before that, then, was what created the malinvestment in the first place. This led to ownership being twisted, which would later come back and create the labor “problems” seen in child labor.

  1. Child labor fell out of favor before government did away with it - Some libertarians cite the 7% child labor rate before the national labor act as proof, though they fail to realize that individual states may have pushed laws before this act. Is there some data that tries to control for almost all actions government did and its relation to child labor rates? I’d like to see evidence that the market itself was what drove child labor out of favor.

Anyway, these are some of the ideas I specifically had some questions about, and I also very, very much value not just new ideas but new sources to back up some of the claims above. So far I have

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/ideas-and-consequences/child-labor-and-the-british-industrial-revolution-2/

and

http://mises.org/daily/2858

And yes, I am aware that the labor laws were pushed by women and unions to decrease competition, but that doesn’t matter in the current debate of what their effect/benefit is now. (of course, it’s a nice point to bring up to people even if just to suggest to them that their history is incomplete/wrong).

Again, comments on the above, thoughts on child labor in general, economical analysis, and definitely some citations. I’d like to make this intellectually rigorous.

P.S. To calm BP, I will issue the “reasonable” statement that I do not back bad conditions and that I realize that labor conditions were crap back then. I am simply asking whether it was indeed free market evil and whether this evil would be rampant in the US if we did away with child labor laws today.

Ron Paul's Book 'End the Fed' Discussion
Ron Paul's Book 'End the Fed' Discussion
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For example, evidence like this:

Most economic historians conclude that this legislation was not the primary reason for the reduction and virtual elimination of child labor between 1880 and 1940. Instead they point out that industrialization and economic growth brought rising incomes, which allowed parents the luxury of keeping their children out of the work force. In addition, child labor rates have been linked to the expansion of schooling, high rates of return from education, and a decrease in the demand for child labor due to technological changes which increased the skills required in some jobs and allowed machines to take jobs previously filled by children. Moehling (1999) finds that the employment rate of 13-year olds around the beginning of the twentieth century did decline in states that enacted age minimums of 14, but so did the rates for 13-year olds not covered by the restrictions. Overall she finds that state laws are linked to only a small fraction – if any – of the decline in child labor. It may be that states experiencing declines were therefore more likely to pass legislation, which was largely symbolic.

From http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.childlabor

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Of course, I must actually read their studies to be sure that this is not merely an appeal to authority…

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If the effects are too distracting, here’s a clean cut.

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“To calm BP, I will issue the “reasonable” statement that I do not back bad conditions and that I realize that labor conditions were crap back then. I am simply asking whether it was indeed free market evil and whether this evil would be rampant in the US if we did away with child labor laws today.”

Aww! You love me!

I don’t have much of a different view on child labor than I do all labor. So I, surprisingly, don’t have much to say about it.

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I think it’s more that he doesn’t want to have to see the predictable whine-fest that ensues everytime your panties get in a twist because someone said something that didn’t involve forcing people to do things and taking stuff from one person and giving it to another.

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You guys

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Translation: “John James knows me too well.”

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Annnnyway, got some other stuff?

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I have a video I watched a couple years ago relating to this thats stuck with me since, i’ll find it tmrw.

& go to bed Wheylous, you are acting irresponsibly :stuck_out_tongue:

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If it weren’t for your inferiority complex, I might find you intelligent.

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To get back on topic…

A counter to an argument I found:

Argument: Well, when children were banned form working, this decreased labor supply, which according to supply and demand increased wages for parents. Hence, all is fine and family income isn’t affected.

Counter: Using that logic, we can also ban women from work. That way their husbands earn more money. Hey, ban black people and white people, too! Take it to the logical conclusion, only allow one person to work! Utopia, right?

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That’s what Ron Paul’s platform is:

  1. Bring back child labor. Ban all schooling, then rebuild 19th century factories that don’t exist anymore. And then force children work in them.

  2. Help Iranians to build nuclear weapons. Then help them drop them on us and the Israelis.

  3. Write racist articles using the White House’s printer.

  4. Johnny Reb economics. This means replacing the Federal Reserve with slavery plantations in the South. Complete with lynching and segregated schools.

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  1. Write racist articles using the White House’s printer.

This made me chuckle.

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good one :slight_smile:

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He is right as far as Ron Paul wants to bring back the legislation of the day when we had child labor. That doesn’t mean child labor would be back. It is a mystery to me where these people think that societal wealth comes from. Apparently they think that the only thing that keeps todays reality-tv watching, smartphone-gaping youth from putting in 14 hour shifts at the textile mill is the government baning it. If that ban was lifted they’d apparently all lose their smartphones or something, suddenly have late 18th century standards of living again and be desperate to do child labor. Or maybe, just maybe, the disappearance of child labor has more to do with the fact that society got richer and can afford to not send it’s children to work.

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Nice reductio.

Kind of to the same point:

Consider the other reality…If you make it illegal for them to have a job, they’ll just get an illegal job. Becaue they need an income. As your point implies, that was one of the advantages to having a big family in earlier eras: You had more help on the farm. People tend to think that as the population grows, the worse off everyone will be…because we have to divide the same stuff among more people…but if that were true, why is it that you find throughout history, when people are dirt poor, a hundred times worse off than we are now, with so much less productive equipment and so much less wealth…they were having such large families?

Doesn’t having 9 children just mean you have 7 more mouths to feed? How could you afford to do that if you’re having trouble getting by before even the first one? Because in reality more poeple doesn’t necessarily mean more mouths to feed…because, (at least before child labor laws) each new person was also a productive agent. The family had a greater total around. In a family of 11 people, enough production took place that the output per person was higher than if there were only 3 people…meaning even though there are all these extra mouths to feed, everyone is eating better.

Again, like Woods points out, in these areas where children are working, it’s because the society is so freaking primitive, that if the children don’t work, the family starves. So you make it illegal for them to work, and they’ll just go into drug running and other gang/cartel activity. Or prostitution. Great job there, you bleeding hearts.

For info on how prosperity per capita increases with population, see here:

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Reposting what I posted in the Chomsky thread because it’s relevant:

Recall what happened when the US passed the Child Labour Deterrence Act in 1993, banning the import of Bangladeshi textiles made with child labour. Did these children suddenly go on to magically become doctors and engineers? Let’s take a look:

Tom Woods has some more material on this in Rollback (his source is Johan Norberg’s In Defense of Capitalism.) A similar attempt to boycott the Nepalese carpet industry “forced five thousand desperate young girls into prostitution.”

Funnily enough, over the past forty years, the poorest developing countries saw the proportion of child labourers in their economies fall from 32 to 19 percent. In the median income group, that figure fell from 28 to 7 percent. Woods doesn’t have similar data on the Industrial Revolution, but he does say that, according to the World Bank, 85 percent of the world’s population was afflicted with absolute poverty in 1820, but by 1950 that figure had fallen to 50 percent, and by 1981 to 33 percent. Poverty “has been reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.”

As for child labour laws today, at best I think they’re redundant. Our economies have developed to the point that the vast majority of people no longer have any need to send their kids to factories; parents can work so that children don’t have to. In fact, the usual result of economic development is that households grow wealthy enough that they can affort to pull their kids out of work and instead send them to school.

I also think Wendy McElroy has some interesting input on this:

Having spent some time arguing about this subject, I would also like to say that while I think people like Ben Powell do good work showing how workers in “sweatshops” are actually seeing their standard of living rise, I don’t like when libertarians say stupid things like, “What the developing world needs is more sweatshops, not less!” Don’t forget the reason why we are in favour of free enterprise, because we think it is the best means to raise the standard of living of the average person (in addition to being the most moral system, most efficient, etc.) Economic development is good because it lifts people out of sweatshop conditions that they are forced into by non-capitalist systems.

Another good resource on this, in my opinion, is Hernando de Soto’s Mystery of Capital. He points out that, in many developing countries, people are systematically deprived of property rights protection. It is made very difficult for them to raise capital, as well as to start their own businesses, which usually involves a bureaucatic procedure lasting years. The end result is that these people are deprived of other options and forced to choose to work in sweatshops, while the Nikes of the world, subsidized by developing world governments and the IMF and World Bank, make a big killing, when they could have started their own enterprises and lifted themselves out of poverty a long time ago.

This same narrative would have been true of the Industrial Revolution, when entrepreneurs flocking into the citizens found themselves locked out of industry by established guilds and monopolies that had government protection. In France in the 1700’s, for example, it was a capital offense to sell cotton without a state license. The end result: industry concentrated, competition reduced, and people forced into deprivation they wouldn’t have had to suffer without the barriers to entry.

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One more article:

http://atlanticsentinel.com/2011/01/did-government-end-child-labor/