Why do I let myself get sucked into Twitter wars?
I’d like to say it’s to entertain all you good folks. And to some degree, it is. (Folllow me @ThomasEWoods if you like.)
But I think it’s because I let people get under my skin. That’s not a good quality.
Anyway:
In response to something I’d written about labor unions, a critic started badgering me about child labor.
What a terrible feature of capitalism, he said.
No, it was a terrible feature of all of world history, I replied.
Thank goodness for people who passed laws against it, he said.
No, I said, thank goodness for capitalism, which created enough wealth that families didn’t have to send their kids to work anymore just to avoid starvation.
Then I was asked: do I really believe my kids would be better off in a factory (than in school, presumably)?
As if the choice we’re talking about is between factory work and school! The actual choice faced by these families is between factory work and starvation.
The British charity Oxfam found that in Bangladesh, where the government caved in to Western demands to suppress child labor, the children — you’ll never guess — didn’t wind up in school! How about that.
Where did they wind up? In prostitution, or dead.
Nice going, geniuses.
Yes, there were laws passed against child labor, but those came when child labor was already practically a thing of the past.
No law is going to keep families from avoiding starvation — and even the left-wing International Labor Organization admits that this is the real reason for child labor. Only capital accumulation makes it possible to end child labor humanely.
My opponent probably isn’t a bad guy. He’s just absorbed the conventional wisdom on pretty much everything.
It’s very easy to blame “capitalism” for child labor. Where is the average person going to hear any other explanation?
This, incidentally, is one of the great merits of the Ron Paul Curriculum — kids won’t have to go through life in this state of ignorance about pretty much everything. They’ll get both sides of the story. How’s that for a radical idea?
Check out the government course I created for it. Suitable for adults, by the way. Can you imagine learning all this in high school?
And yes, there’s even a lecture on child labor.
It’s 20 years of learning on my part, stuffed into a one-semester course.
Save yourself 19 1/2 years of effort.
You ain’t never seen a course like this:
