I worked when I was a kid starting at around 11. Picked up deer apples in an apple orchard for something like $40/ton. That was the job not even the migrant workers would do. Picking up rotting apples off the ground and trying to avoid the poison ivy, snakes, ticks and bees.

If they don't like one they leave it. Even 4 year olds can tell if they like something. My 2yo knows what he likes and what he doesn't.

Maybe decisions are 'hard' for 18 year olds because they haven't been making decisions all along.

No, please, I would love to hear your explanation as to how severely and continuously restrictive child labor caused German states to grow and prosper.

Such an explanation might make sense of the rest of your post.

Would also like an explanation as to how your description of feudalism differs from any modern western states today - in particular, differences with items I have bolded.

So, I take it from your OP, that in order to break the chain and avoid "rinse and repeat" child labor simply needs to be banned.

And that the byproducts of private property and free-ish markets -- capital accumulation and the rise in societal wealth and standards of living -- simply cannot offer an escape path from this vicious cycle, absent any prohibitive labor laws. Nay, rather these byproducts inflict an even more evil predicament upon these childrens' children.

Am I understanding you correctly?

Funny how history kinda sorta played out in the exact opposite way across several continents.

Guess we should ignore those historical arguments.

I don't think most people here will understand the libertarian arguments on this very well.

Libertarians are rather unique in their childrearing practices in that they tend to allow their children much more freedom of choice than the average population does.

In effect the standard is to treat children as property, similar to what slaves were treated like during the last 200 years of slavery in the west. The justifications for why they must be treated this way are often the same as those used for slaves back then.

It's nothing sinister. Most people learn to raise children from the way they themselves were raised, thus there is a continuum of childrearing practices that tends to evolve much more slowly than other practices. This continuum goes back to our hunter-gatherer days, when the strategies for successful childrearing were the absolute opposite of today's, for reasons I can get into if anyone is interested.

How much freedom of choice? Where is the line drawn if there is a line at all?

I can't believe some posters are in favour of child labour voluntary, forced or otherwise.

How is a child having to work to put food on the table anything other than been forced to work?

People are forced to do things to survive by their basic needs. The source of "coercion" is not the employer, but the existence of needs. Removing a survival option isn't "tackling coercion" while the needs are so strong that the child would sincerely prefer working to the even worse alternatives.

First off my source for Child labour in North Carolina was a German Documentary, that said because there is a hole in the law children can work on farms just as adults can - so the farmers use mexican children to pick tabacco there.

It was really sad.

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Yes, banning child labour is absolutely necessary - also I have to agree that it does not solve all problems and it is a part of a bigger picture. Which I would describe as the "return to feudalism".

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I think I outlayed the fundamental diffferences between the modern western state and a classical feudal society pretty well. Read the wikipedia on Feudalism. It gives you a necessary background. And yes it may very well be that today feudal principles return.

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Name one nation without a democratic body and human rights that prospered in a way that large % of the population could profit from it.

Children can't even lawfully agree to contracts. There free-will is very limited. They make poor choices.

That is why the differentation between "forced" and "voluntary" is so utterly simplifying that it borders on deliberate intelectual dishonesty.

Also as I layed out they are part of a vicious cycle they are forced into it by poverty!

If the employer hired the Father/Mother and paid him/her a rate to at the very least house, clothe and feed a family the children would not be forced to make a choice between work and starvation.

TBH I expected this thread to be slightly more hilarious but it still delivers.

This assumes the parents are productive enough to earn that sort of wage, or are even around in the first place.

This, basically. As a society builds up it's capital base and as its workers become more productive, the need for child labor evaporates and the supply of such does as well as parents become productive enough to A) not need their children to be productive and B) can afford to educate them.

Obviously in agrarian societies there is plenty of child-friendly labor available (kids don't usually get mangled by machines when they're milking a cow or picking corn or whatever).

The point is that other solutions should be pursued. And in reality can be. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but am I crazy for thinking that the behavior of certain multinational corporations encourages repressive regimes to actively block or outlaw labor organizing and workers' unions in places where they might otherwise arise? I feel like this is closer to the typical dynamic wherein sweatshop labor exists today, and less so the binary scenario of (1) starve to death immediately, or (2) send all the little ones to Crazy Ted's unregulated (why is it unregulated, by the way?) mining consortium.

Yeah pretty much. Child labor arises out of the natural reality that their parents and social group lack the skills, intelligence, drive or values to produce enough for themselves without having to sell their labor under terrible conditions.

What if it's one or the other? Which is the greater evil? That's the only interesting question. I think we all agree that other solutions would be preferable.

+1.

This is what I was talking about. It just is not true.

They are hiring children all over the world because they are cheaper and more effective than machines, or just because they do not want to spend the money for machinery.

What allows them to do it, are lax labor laws and small or ineffective governments that fail to enact the laws or help circumventing them.

It is a reality that child labour destroys the future of the kids!

Banning child labour is the only thing preventing it in certain areas of the world. It is shown by history and logic.

How do you break the vicious circle?

Why did the modern western capitalist society only developed when human rights and big states were established?

In my OP I explained that agrarian societies are not just "agrarian societies" by default they are because the owners can directly tax the individuals by letting them work for them. This also extends to a certain degree to manufacturing and industrial production. Though modern high tech is hardly possible in that society. Still it benefits the owners hugely.

Have Third World regimes annoited monopoly rights to certain corporations? Because if they haven't, it seems that investing in there should be super profitable with those ultra low wages.

Child labor is probably one of the least black and white issues in the whole world.

Here are some reports on child labor:

http://www.unicef.org/wcaro/WCARO_Ni...hildLabour.pdf
http://www.dol.gov/ilab/media/report...sweat/cote.htm

I guess in the abstract we can talk about child labor and whether it's intolerable or necessary or whatever, but this doesn't apply particularly well to child labor in the real world. Much/most of it occurs in informal settings (street vendors, subsistence agriculture, etc). Often the families are forcing the kids to do the work in the first place. Most countries already have laws against child labor, but are unable to enforce them. Many countries have agrarian economies that require children to work the fields, and have been like that for centuries. Some countries have millions of AIDS orphans.

Whenever I'm traveling to a country where kids are going to be selling stuff, I make sure to figure out whether school is free or not. If school is free for kids of whatever age (usually primary school is free, sometimes secondary school is not), I won't buy from kids. Parents often take their kids out of school and put them on the street selling ice cream or whatever, and you don't want to incentivize that. But if it's not free for them to be in school, I'm not sure what else you can expect them to do.

Absolutely, in many cases.

Also, wages may be low, but labor costs can still be high. And the other costs of doing business startlingly high.

Have you ever been to the poor regions of the world? People who **** freely on the streets, have 8 kids, and follow weird caste systems won't be prosperous for generations.

Well obviously. The question though, and the point of my post, is why are the kids/parents doing it?

The question is whether banning cheap/child labor will actually be good for these regions.

These kids don't usually have a future anyway.

You're going to have to expand on this, because I just don't see either the history or logic.

For example, India's economy is driven by the West - they'd still be in the 15th century without us. The Green Revolution and investment by Western companies - because of the cheap labor - is what's propping that place up. Indigenous talent and enterprise is basically non existent without foreign capital. Same is true for the Philippines, China (who've prospered largely through investment and theft), and so on.

Why is that question so interesting? To me, it belongs to that class of morbid scenarios where situations are boiled down to competing evils, and so you're forced to pick the lesser one. As in: Do you let Bubba become intimate with your rectum, or forsake his protection and face death-by-shanking in the prisonyard tomorrow? Do you shoot your parents to be accepted as a concentration camp kapo and thereby survive, or decide the terms are unacceptable and consign yourself to the furnace with the others? Like, the horror of it is intense, but I don't see that much complexity there. Child labor (I hope) is not quite that awful in most cases, and yes, I can see it being a brutal necessity in various circumstances.

The bit where it gets interesting to me is when I hear (but perhaps I'm misunderstanding?) apologists (of the corporate type as well as the more political theoretical free market type) rejecting policies, programs, or efforts intended to ameliorate the problem. You'll get dismissive, simplifying replies like, "Oh, what. You're gonna outlaw child labor and then the kids starve. Idiot," without the person checking to see if there's more to the policy than a flat interdiction, and more importantly, without the person offering an alternative beyond, "Do nothing. The market (/ economy) will fix it. Over time. Probably. Like what happened in the post-industrial West. What? Bloody labor struggles and government regulations did that? You're such a noob! It would have happened faster and more efficiently if the State and the Unions had left it alone!"

Which brings me to the second thing I find more interesting than "pick your poison" dilemmas: Identifying and dissecting individual, corporate, and even state-level strategies to actively undermine local, community- or labor-based organizing (as well as international efforts) intended to secure basic worker rights and more humane conditions and, finally, some leverage to negotiate wages.