President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Of course people will sometimes do awful things without regulation. ... it's why we are a nation of laws.

Those laws (and regulations) have always been best when they keep people from harming others against their wills. Like you can't murder someone. ... you can't steal from someone. Etc.

Where we have largely gone wrong is in the endless regulation of things in the name of protecting people. ... when the people you are supposedly protecting wouldn't have made the same choice you are making for them on their own given their lives and economic realities. It doesn't mean people are happy with a lot of the shitty things they choose to endure to get through their lives. It means that they make the best choices for themselves given the realities they are dealing with. And it's still voluntary exchange.

Paradoxically, trying to regulate away inequity can actually make things a lot worse for those people. And that is what people who thing "regulation" is some magic word, completely ignore. There was voluntary exchange in the first place -- even though it still objectively has people living in bad circumstances -- for a reason.

The thing that is different in the case of the children in that photo. ... is that they are children. And children presumably can't make decisions the way that adults do, so you want to protect children from harm by regulating their behavior until they are mature enough to make choices for themselves in a more reasoned way. It still doesn't address the fact that those children were working in mines because of the economic realities of their family's lives, and just regulating it away didn't magically change those realities. The food they ate still had to come from somewhere (and someone else) if you said, "You can't work anymore."

 

You really think the parents of the kids in that photo were thnking about changing their economic conditions? They had so few options for that. Those kids were earning money so they could eat.

Free markets don't "solve" people's problems. What they do is allow people to make the decisions for themselves that they think best serve their purposes given reality. Like if you are dirt poor and everyone around you is dirt poor, jobs are few, everyone in the family is hungry. ... you use the little leverage you have in life to try to get food on the table that night.

 

They are disadvantaged by being poor, not by the things they have to do BECAUSE they are poor. You aren't legislating that away with a child labor law. Sorry. At best, you can redistribute wealth. That's not even what really happened in this country. There were state child labor laws -- and activists pushing for stronger laws-- in the 1800s. It wasn't like anyone thought it was good for children to be working instead of in school. The laws that existed were largely unenforceable, though, because for 20, 30 percent of families they needed the income to just get by. It's why migrants who were poorer had really high levels of child labor force participation.

Once again, what changed wasn't that people suddenly became enlightened. . ... the actual realiyt is that this country became much wealthier (under a system of free market capitalism that prospered in the late 19th century into last century) and children didn't have to work in the numbers they once did.