Without a long exegesis on the merits of child labor laws, allow me to raise the following observations without comment (for example, we could spend weeks discussing what it means to be a child). My sense is that most people would view child labor laws as useful, and that the employment of children is a woeful and abusive enterprise.
Here is something I have never understood. When child labor laws were inacted, it presumably threw a bunch of kids out of factories and I guess emerging compulsory education laws redirected them into schools.
But hadn’t the families decided it was in everyone’s best interest, the kid included, to keep the kid working, even though school, or some other alternative was available? If so weren’t the families necessrily made worse off by enactment of these laws?
JB and Wintercow provide thoughtful analysis, provoking me to through in my two cents.
Having grown up on a dairy farm, my own child labor meant that as soon as my father thought I was capable of driving a John Deere B through a corn field with a cultivator he had me on the tractor. This was great fun. I may have felt exploited for having to mow assorted yards, but working in the summer was something I never questioned.
A decade later we would hire other teenagers, and even after the wintercows were gone, would hire other great kids.
One went to the Naval Academy, got a Marine commission, and became a SEAL, and I have to think his waking up at 4:30 AM to milk the cows, not to mention lifting 200-pound feed bags contributed to his admirable character.
We had two dozen more or less kids work on the farm over the years, in addition to regular employees. Many turned out well, several other success stories.
Today, with workmen’s comp and all of what one has to go through to hire a teenager to stand on a hay wagon to stack bales, I’m glad not to have to worry about it, let alone let a teenager to get close enough to a cow to milk it.
Which brings me to my new kid who mows my lawn. His job is also fixing fences, understanding machinery and biology, and understanding how to use tools, including the basic ones: an adjustable wrench, a big screwdriver, and a hammer.
All of this has happened without benefit of the Stimulus, or the Keynesean Multiplier.