As soon as children discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nicer. And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice? Aw … kids are so tender-hearted.
But kids are broke — so they want to make the world nicer with your money. And kids don’t have much control over things — so they want to make the world nicer through your effort. And kids are very busy being young — so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer.
This is from P.J. O’Rourke, “This is why millennials adore socialism,” New York Post, September 12, 2020.
Lots of good stuff here. I do want to address one error, an error that P.J. seems to agree with “progressives” about. He writes:
That would have been in the 19th century — during America’s first “Progressive Era” — when mechanization liberated kids from onerous farm chores and child labor laws let them escape from child labor.
Actually, it wasn’t child labor laws that let them escape from child labor: it was economic growth. As people grew wealthier, parents no longer needed their children to be productive. Instead, they could support the family without their children’s income and so instead could send their kids to school. And incidentally, as E.G. West showed in Education and the State, the state in Britain was not a major funder of education and yet schooling was widespread.
It is true that child labor laws reduced child labor around the edges. But they’re an instance of what is almost a general law in economic policy. I’m using “general law” in the sense of regularity. The laws that pick up enough support are usually ones that require people to do what the majority are doing already. I believe for example, although I can’t find the source immediately, that the legislated 40-hour work week came about only after it had become standard practice.
Another good excerpt:
Intellectuals like Marxism because Marx makes economics simple — the rich get their money from the poor. (How the rich manage this, since the poor by definition don’t have any money, is beyond me. But never mind.)
This excerpt reminds me of a great paragraph from Paul Krugman’s 1990 book The Age of Diminished Expectations that I used in the first edition of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, in a sidebar on the article “Distribution of Income” by Frank Levy:
One reason that action to limit growing income inequality in the United States is difficult is that the growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story—the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that’s just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most of our very poor don’t work, which makes it hard to exploit them. For another, the poor had so little to start with that the dollar value of the gains of the rich dwarfs that of the losses of the poor. (In constant dollars, the increase in per family income among the top tenth of the population in the 1980s was about a dozen times as large as the decline among the bottom tenth.)
The O’Rourke piece is excerpted from P.J. O’Rourke, A Cry from the Far Middle, 2020.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Sep 14 2020 at 12:58pm
Excellent. I’ve never understood criticisms of child labor in the 19th century. Do critics think parents then were monsters? If so, they should provide evidence.
Child labor met two needs. It helped feed the family to a small degree, but more importantly it provided skills training so the child could have a good job when old enough to marry. We expect public education to do that today, but it does a very poor job of it. In the 19th century, parents would apprentice sons to skilled craftsmen at young ages, but older than we start them in school today. And the work was no harder than what they do in school today. By the time they reached their teens they had gained enough skill to support themselves and within a few years a family. How many high school grads can support themselves today.
Phil H
Sep 14 2020 at 8:05pm
“Actually, it wasn’t child labor laws that let them escape from child labor: it was economic growth.”
This is a good point, one I think about quite a lot. I think DH is right to say that markets create the conditions necessary for laws to succeed. The precise function of the law then varies, I guess, mainly being to lock in existing change.
“the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that’s just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most of our very poor don’t work, which makes it hard to exploit them. For another, the poor had so little to start with that the dollar value of the gains of the rich dwarfs that of the losses of the poor.”
But this is just incoherent. If the rich systematically skewed the economy so that the social and financial benefits of growth flowed to them, that is exploitation. Exploitation was never just robbery. This a is duh-level basic straw man.
Aleksander
Sep 15 2020 at 1:02am
The benefits have to somehow flow from the poor in order for it to be “exploitation”.
Phil H
Sep 16 2020 at 9:35pm
No, the benefits can be diverted before they ever reach the poor people, and it’s still exploitation. To give you a graphic example: slaves generally own next to nothing. They are exploited because their labour is taken from them without payment – that’s the kind of exploitation you were talking about. But they are also exploited by being excluded from other social activities like education, property rights, and freedom to profit. This secondary exploitation meant that they were unable to build up human capital, assets, or financial capital. They never had any of those things, so you can’t say that their assets “flowed from them,” nevertheless, this is also a form of exploitation.
Matthias Görgens
Sep 17 2020 at 1:27pm
Your second example is certainly bad, but I’m not sure it’s exploitation?
Or rather, what definition of exploitation would you be using here?
Phil H
Sep 18 2020 at 2:58am
Well… I see exploitation as being a little broader than theft.
Here’s a dictionary definition: “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”
My slavery example certainly fits this definition. In the case of the non-working poor, it doesn’t fit directly. You would have to construct some kind of group identity, and say this group (e.g. the working classes) has contributed to growth, but now they’ve been treated so unfairly that they are locked out of the jobs market.
Here’s a Marxist definition from Wikipedia: “Exploiters appropriate another’s surplus labour”
I think the same applies here. I agree that the case of the non-working poor do not fit directly, and some extra concepts are required. But these can be very basic.
Ultimately, if you want to use different terminology, that’s fine. I’m just saying that in addition to the stealing of labour, there are a number of things that exploitative rich classes can do that harm the less privileged. I use the word “exploitation” to cover them all. If you want to divide them up into several words, I’m fine with that.
Aleksander
Sep 19 2020 at 2:28am
I’m pretty sure the sentence you quoted assumes a different definition of “exploitation” than you do. There’s nothing incoherent about it.
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