Protectionism --- Free Trade Poll

How am I supposed to respond to that? You make a general, wide-ranging comment and want a simplistic answer. We had child labor attrocities in this country throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century. We also had some backward-ass restrictive protectionist policies in place and the last vestiges of mercantilism that prevented the kind of competition we have since benefited from as thought has drifted toward the ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume and other classical economists.

Your question is broad and really doesn't relate to what I have been saying, and I am not understanding how it fits into a c conversation about free trade. Am I supposed to now detail the restrictive protectionist policies that dominated the U.S. at the same time "children were working in mines."? And if I allow you to sidetrack me, and then take the time to do that, will you make a cause and effect argument that the reason children were working in mines was that short-sighted (and more often, corrupt) government policy stifled competitive practices in general (not just when it came to trade)?

 

WI, This is a sidetrack... But child labor was commonplace throughout history -- by necessity. Prior to the industrial revolution, children were put to work in the agrarian economy. It was out of necessity, not because of unscrupulous adults. I will credit this to Milton Friedman... But he demonstrated how the industrial revolution -- because of the net gains to our economy it brought about -- actually brought about a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase. I don't have to "believe" that. It's provable using empirical evidence. What the industrial revolution -- to a large extent, the economy working on its own, rather than being managed -- made happen was that people became wealthier. Real wages rose, and more parents became able to afford to send their children to school instead of work. And as a result, child labor declined compared to the hundreds of years before, in which virtually all children were put to work. This decline happened both before AND after the legislation you are touting.

Again, it is cause and effect. Competitive practices made it so that parents didn't have to put their children to work. Forced legislation may have too. What the legislation did, though, was enforce rules that the economy at the time could not yet handle. Most of the poor states still needed child labor--as abhorrent as it sounds to our sensibilities today, it was the difference between families getting by and families starving. And what the legislation may have done was retard the economic growth that could have ended child labor on its own, while making people better off economically at the same time.

Look at poor societies today. Parents put their children to work in third-wold countries. Is it economic reality that is making them do this or "unscrupulous" behavior? And is the best way to handle it to outlaw it -- and make those economies suffer for decades more because families can't afford to feed everyone -- or is it better to allow competitive practices raise the standard of living to the point that parents don't have to send their children to work?