Saturday, June 30, 2012

Child Labor

A fourteen year old boy goes to the grocery store to ask for a job. He is turned away, told that hiring him is against the law. He’s not seeking full time employment; he’s seeking to bag groceries for a few hours on the weekend. He is not allowed to because the law, which knows better, tells him he is not yet ready to work for income. The only income allowable to people his age comes from chores, or sometimes lawn mowing or babysitting.

Mention allowing that child to get a job, and the response is horror stories about factories and coal mines. It is a temporal fallacy because while that was once the case it is not the case today. Allowing people under the age of sixteen to seek employment will not result in children being taken out of schools and locked in dangerous factories.

It is not as if there are no exceptions to child labor laws. Minors are employable on family businesses and in artistic pursuits. Allegedly these are different because of parental involvement, which would mean that those in favor of child labor laws believe that parents would abuse their children if given any other labor option for their children.

There are jobs today that are just as safe for a person of fourteen years as they are for a person of sixteen years. Those jobs involve asking "paper or plastic" or "would you like fries with that." Those jobs are there as entry level positions that enable a person to learn how to hold down a job. Some people even go so far as to suggest that those jobs are created specifically for teenagers to soak up some surplus labor.

Given that conditions have changed much since the days of the coal mines and the locked factories, it is clearly time to stop thinking of those times as a basis for restricting child labor, and allowing those who wish to succeed a chance to do so.

Saturday, June 23, 2012


Due to some personal problems, including my motorcycle getting stolen, I am unable to post a blog entry this week.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Let Them Eat Healthcare

It is not true that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake" when informed that the peasants had no bread. The point of that quote, however apocryphal, isn't to show her as callous though. The point is to show she had no comprehension of the plight of the poor. In the myth she was trying to be helpful by way of suggesting that since cake is like bread if someone is out of bread they can eat cake instead.

In the healthcare debate, with regards to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the debate often centers about people who do not have healthcare. In fact, many of those so described do have healthcare, they do not have health insurance. Those described as lacking care can easily get care, and in many cases do not have to pay.

An unfortunate aspect of the whole Healthcare Reform debate is that advocates of increased government intervention routinely confuse care and coverage. Even after this obfuscation is pointed out, advocates of increased government intervention continue to make the same error. There seems to be no way to shame an advocate of increased government intervention to accurately describe the debate as over healthcare coverage and not over healthcare itself.

And yet, that is the point. Healthcare does become less available the more the government intervenes. "But everyone is covered" does little good if there is nothing the coverage can buy. Many dentists refuse to accept Medi-Medi patients, and more doctors are refusing to do so as well. Massachusetts had to pass a law stating that all Ob-Gyns had to accept the state sponsored insurance. There is a crisis in West Virginia as more and more doctors flee the state due to malpractice lawsuit abuse.

Coverage is expanding, yet what that coverage can buy is shrinking. It leads to the question of what that coverage is supposed to purchase. Is someone in need of a bandage supposed to wrap insurance forms around the injury? Once there is plenty of healthcare coverage and yet no healthcare, perhaps it will be reported that some senior government official will be heard to say "let them eat healthcare."

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Collapse in Motion

For some reason there exists a belief that economic collapses are sudden events. Because the collapse isn’t happening all at once, those who see what is happening must be wrong. This is true even in the rather fast collapse that started in 2008 with the housing collapse.

People generally think that the Great Depression of 1929, which started officially in, happened all at once with the stock market crash of 1929. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the crash was not the cause of the Great Depression, but was instead the trigger.

The same is true of the Great Depression of 2008 in that it was not caused by but was instead triggered by the collapse of the housing market. The second Great Depression actually started in late 2007, but the effects weren’t noticed until the housing market was no longer able to disguise the symptoms in the rest of the economy.

Collapses take time. This is true even of rapid collapses like in 1929 and 2008; it takes time for the many failed institutions to wind through and finish - longer if the government attempts intervention to rescue failed institutions.

Political collapses take even longer. The reason people do not believe that the current United States imperium is not in decline is because the decline has been going on for several decades. If the several years of an economic decline are too long for the average observer, then the several decades of political decline are beyond notice for the average observer.

Like an economic collapse, political collapses aren’t single events but often have a single event trigger. The collapse of the Roman Empire didn’t occur when barbarians invaded, but was made real when barbarians invaded. Until the invasion, Rome looked as might as ever, but was a hollow shell.

This decline, economic and political, will not be visible to someone who hasn’t studied history. Because it is not apparent on the surface it is something that won’t be believed, especially since so many people have an emotional investment in the current greatness of the United States. Reality doesn’t care of people don’t believe in the collapse.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

The Hidden Premise of Collectivism

At the Library of Economics and Liberty, another argument was made to see if a justification for aggressive force could be made in certain limited circumstances. The situation is pretty simple, an island with ten people. Eight of them can produce enough food for one person each, one of them named Able Abel can produce enough food for all ten people, and one of them named Hapless Harry cannot produce any food at all.

The goal is to prove that under certain conditions it is justified to take from Able Abel and give to Hapless Harry, and for the other eight people to engage in the use of force in order to do so. In fact, there are some who already agree that use of force against Able Abel is justified.

There is one major problem with the scenario. It conflates a political obligation to help Hapless Harry with a moral obligation to do so, and that conflation is exactly the trap that Progressives hope people will fall in to. If Abel Able helps because it is the right thing to do, he is not a slave unless one is to call him a slave to his conscience. But according to progressives, unless Able Abel is forced to help then he will refuse to help. That hidden premise, that Able Abel would not help unless forced to, is actually quite monstrous, and says far more about progressives than libertarians.

Of course, the progressive response would be to say that libertarians are of course selfish. This is asserted without support, as if it is somehow self-evident that a desire to not steal from others is selfish.

Contrast this to the way the heroes of Ayn Rand’s novels behaved. The Classically Liberal Student described the scene from Atlas Shrugged where Dagny Taggart saw a beggar on a train.

Dagny actually looks at both men and sees that neither views the other properly: "The two men were not human beings to each other any longer." The tramp gets up, ready to jump, grabbing the small bundle of his belongings. Dagny yells out: "Wait." Rand wrote, "'Let him be my guest,' she said to the conductor, and held her door open for the tramp, ordering, 'Come in.'"

She offers the man a seat and asks him when he last ate. He responds, it might have been the day before. "She rang for the porter and ordered dinner for two, to be brought to her car from the diner." Damn, Rand, she missed a chance to prove that her critics aren't liars!

The tramp and Dagny talk. He tells her he doesn't want her to get in trouble. She wonders why she would, and he says because she must be traveling with a tycoon to be in her own car. She says she isn't. He assumes she must a tycoon's wife then. She says she isn't. He responds with a knowing, "Oh," implying her purpose was that of a prostitute or mistress. Was this where she sends him flying to his demise? Damn, not again! Instead, she laughed and told him she ran the railroad. They share dinner and conversation for several more pages. What a monster!

He goes on to describe how Ayn Rand herself reflected the generosity of the characters that are heroes in her novels. And yet it is still asserted that libertarians are greedy, objectivists are greedy, that those who advocate liberty and the free market would never help Hapless Harry without being forced to do so.