Can you tell me what the child labor statistics looked like when child labor laws came into existence? How about 20 years prior?
I don't know that such statistics were kept; there is evidence of what happened a lot.
Do you know why we had child labor? Do you think we just had a lot of bad parents in those days? What about outside the US where child labor is still abundant? Think it's because of a bunch of bad parents? No, they work because they have to support the family, because their parents don't make enough money.
You don't realize you're making my point.
I don't know if you know the history of labor, your posts suggests no.
Things changed a lot with the industrial revolution - that's when it begins to make sense to discuss 'labor issues' with any relevance to today. Before that most were agrarian.
In the early decades, there was an ideology in the US - a lot like the Libertarians - that was almost entirely in favor of the owners, and almost nothing for the workers.
There was not only no right to organize, it was illegal - and companies had 'security forces' to enforce the point. In the early days when workers would strike, there were times the US President would send in the military to force the workers back to work - sometimes with fatal means. There was basically required in worker safety, in helping workers who were injured, in work hours, in minimum wage, or many other things.
And we had mass poverty. In 1900, adjusted for inflation, the average American income was $10,000 - well under the poverty line we later created.
As a first 'reform', since this is a democracy there was some pressure to do something, the idea was promoted of the 'contract' between employer and employee - but since people have to eat, this 'power' balance was very one-sided, and employers were able to pressure one worker at a time down to 'take it or starve' and then claim the 'contract' said it was consensual and so no problem.
This is what led to the drive for collective labor - the imbalance of power of one worker versus the employer where one worker could be disposable.
As progressives began to gain power, with the right to organize in part, they could start to make a few demands to address these issues.
The accidental president Teddy Roosevelt - after the very pro-owner McKinley was assassinated - was the first 'progressive' president, and some reforms started with him, and were later expanded under his cousin FDR. But here's the point I'm making in mentioning this.
You make my point by pointing out how the kids 'had to work' because the family couldn't get by.
*That is the natural result of the pro-owner policies that led to such low wages for workers before unions*.
It wasn't that society didn't have the wealth - it was that these pro-owner policies - which include the libertarian policies today - impoverished people so much that they had wages so low as to 'need' for their children to work. It was the progressives who fought for the 'better society' where children did not have to - which meant infringing on people's 'rights' for children to work and outlawing it. Just as minimum wage laws helped build the middle class by eliminating the 'right' to contract to work for almost nothing, to eat.
The right-wing, the libertarian, policies want to reverse these improvements and return to the 'ownership society', which is the 'owner society' for the few.
And that's why we had an abundance of child labor in our past. Regarding slavery, I'm not sure why it's relevant here.
For one, because it's the logical end of the 'always lower wages' approach.
Slavery wasn't the result of free markets, that's absurd, slavery had been around a long time before that.
Oh, there was no such thing as markets before? They're a modern invention? No supply and demand, those market forces weren't there? Of course the market encourages it.
Slavery was the result of ignorance and tyranny.
Ignorance - perhaps, ignorance of the ethical school why it's wrong, but that doesn't change that it's what the market wants, absent the morality overriding it.
Tyranny? There's no tyranny in 'free markets'? Of course there is - the absence of tyranny is a political issue, not a market issue.
People have long served the needs of markets while under tyranny, as cheap labor.
Slavery is an idea in opposition to the basic principles of freedom, that you own your life, your body, and the fruits of your labor. Of course, you Craig, are also in opposition to those ideas.
Don't be a disgusting, lying ass moved to ignore. You're one step.
As to your previous sentence, don't confuse freedom and free markets. You have no right to eat, to a dwelling, to medical care, and the degree to which you can get them has to do with the society - and things like the degree to which it embraces liberal values that value you having those things. There's nothing violating the 'free market' for people to be 'economic slaves' under 'economic tyranny' where they are disposable labor, with bare sustinence, if they complain or are injured or unneeded, let them starve if it profits owners.
You want to manage my life, what goes into my body, and certainly don't believe I own the fruits of my labor. Of course you don't see your ideas as tyrannical, because it's all for my own good, right?
I realize that libertarians can be a huge drain on a forum, needing thousands of posts trying to educate them about the misconceptions they have - and fiercely keep.
You have a wrongheaded idea about 'freedom' again, and it's tedious and really a waste of time trying to explain the same thing a dozen times and more dozens after.
I know, all taxes are tyrannical violence against your freedom by thugs at gunpoint.
You're on another planet, and I question the usefulness of talking at this point.
I could discuss the nuggets of truth of your diatribe straw man about my position, and the areas it's wrong, but I don't generally reward someone who is so dishonest and reckless in their characterization of my position, trying to gain with misrepresentation and attack what you can't get with honest discussion.
You can continue to have your utopian misconceptions that will never be put in practice because they're completely impractical, frothing against real options.
The effort to reward of educating someone so ideologically indoctrinated is enormous if not infinite.
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