Child labor and freedom

View 703 Friday, December 02, 2011

I went to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) ** last night, and after the meeting I got into a conversation with an old friend. The conversation drifted to politics as such things do this year, and he denounced Newt Gingrich as flighty and impulsive. I asked for an example, expecting the immigration issue, and was told that he wanted to change the Child Labor laws to allow children to be janitors, and that was a terribly dangerous thing to do because of all the chemicals involved. I hadn’t heard anything about this, and there was nothing in this morning’s paper about it, but the radio is full of denunciations of Newt Gingrich. Al Sharpton charges racism, of course. Some web site that looks as if it were Tea Party but probably is not speaks of “disgusting rhetoric from eye of Newt”, and says:

Incredibly, Gingrich compared making kids work as janitors to a successful program that paid kids to read books. Of course, reading books is not hard labor and is directly relevant to education — cleaning bathrooms is not.

Well, it may be that cleaning bathrooms is hard labor and not relevant to education, but when I was a pupil at Capleville consolidated in Tennessee, the 7^th and 8^th graders were expected to mop floors (not with any chemicals I know of; just whatever you mopped floors with) and we didn’t even get paid for it. We also cleaned up after ourselves in the lunch room from 4^th grade on. But of course what Newt was driving at had nothing to do with janitorial work per se, and most of the examples he gave were for more clerical tasks; and his point was that there are generations growing up now who have no work habits, and little conception of the connection between showing up on time, doing a job, and getting rewarded for that. Today’s children are apparently entitled to two (or even three) meals a day from the school without even having to refrain from disrupting the classes, much less actually do some work for the meal.

I know precisely where this idea came from. I can recall when Newt was still Minority Whip a conversation with Newt and my son Richard, then a Congressional Committee staffer, in an Irish pub across the street from the Capitol. The conversation came around to laws that got in the way, and I brought up the Federal Minimum Wage and other regulations that ended the “board jobs” that enabled me to get through my first year at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. I worked at Reich’s Café; a “board job” was an hour of waiting on tables, in exchange for a meal off the Café menu. I also got to keep any tips I might earn, which in my case amounted to about thirty cents an hour, which wasn’t trivial in those days of 25 cent milkshakes. Those jobs are all gone now, ended by Federal labor laws.

We also discussed the loss of work habits. When I was young I wanted a .22 rifle (and it wasn’t unusual in Tennessee in those days for ten year olds to have and to carry .22 rifles). I was paid ten cents an hour for picking cotton, later raised to a quarter an hour after I learned to be more efficient (and I suspect my parents felt sorry for me). So there I was in the fields along with the sharecroppers, who thought it was amusing, but who kept my bags separate from the rest, I suspect so that they could go through them and be sure I hadn’t left hulls in there, which would lower the price Mr. Lamb’s gin in Mineral Wells, Mississippi would pay for the cotton. I learned a lot from doing that: to show up on time, to work steadily (I got docked for low productivity at first, on the testimony of the sharecropper), and to find some other way to make money because picking cotton sucked.

But the point was that I grew up knowing there is a connection between productive work and being paid. So did my son Richard, but Richard pointed out that there were still many laws in place that made it very difficult for youngsters to get work. Richard and his older brothers swept Studio City sidewalks for the merchants, but it had to be done in rather mysterious ways because of the various laws. Here were these boys who wanted the job, and merchants who wanted their sidewalks swept off after wind blew leaves all over, but it was illegal just to pay them for getting the sidewalks clear. This made no sense.

We went on to talk about the effects on a nation of having generations who grow up not really connecting work habits with life, and who felt entitled to anything they got without having to do anything in exchange.

Incidentally, in those days Newt Gingrich and Mr. Jones and some other of his supporters were establishing a program to pay kids to read books – it had to be a “reward” rather than “work” because of the various child labor laws. It’s all right to give a kid a dollar for reading a book, but giving him a job reading that book is illegal. This is, after all, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The conversation went on well into the night – we were all younger in those days – and I am sure Newt has been thinking about these matters ever since, and it’s no surprise at all that he brought it up in a Presidential campaign. It’s who he is. And all of you, and I, and Newt know that any changes in fundamentals like Child Labor are going to be thoroughly discussed, and hazards like disinfectants and cleaning chemicals will be thought about, but the fundamental principle remains:

Either kids grow up expecting to work for a living and developing elementary work habits, or they don’t; and if they don’t, they are going to be handicapped for the rest of their lives. That’s hardly a racist statement: it’s as true of Yuppie kids in the Valley as ghetto kids, and it shows in both cases. Kids who learn that you’re supposed to work for a living have a head start. It makes a lot of sense to look at such matters to see what results the current legal system have on that fundamental notion.

I would never have advised Newt to bring something like that up in a campaign for nomination, but I sure understand where he’s coming from. So should you. It’s impossible to sustain an economy in which large segments of the population do not associate work with earning, and who think they are entitled to the goods of fortune at the expense of someone else. That’s not the way the world works, and any society not founded in productivity is doomed: as Lady Thatcher observed long ago, Socialism is great until you run out of other people’s money.

But we all knew that.

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** As you may guess the LASFS web site is maintained by science fiction fans who have volunteered to build and keep the site. Any resemblance to the cast of The Big Bang Theory is not entirely coincidental.

I keep repeating this. Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

But if you don’t care for freedom, you must look into the alternatives. We are back to the notion of a command economy, which is supposed to be more efficient and more stable than freedom. China is often held up as an example. What America needs is a Five Year Plan.

And we have “social science” classes at grade, high school, and college levels taught by teachers who do not know that this experiment has been run, many times, in many places, and the results have not been favorable. No matter what twists have been employed, and no matter how rational the arguments for a command economy appear to be, the experiments have always had the same result.

I can recall when “The Five Year Plan” was the punch line for a great many jokes. Now, apparently, in many “social science” classes it is the remedy to all our problems. Such is the state of education in these United States of America.

Freedom is not free. Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.

The headlines are that unemployment is below 9%, magically down to 8.6%. This is because more people gave up looking for a job, not due to more people being employed. The real unemployment rate in the United States is above 15%. But of course it you don’t count someone who isn’t looking for a job because he simply gave up and is now looking to maximize entitlements, that brings the numbers down. Ah well.

I managed to pay the bills and get them off to the post office. They were high this month because of the water damage to my bathroom and the dining room ceiling. If you’re thinking of subscribing, this would be a good time to do it. I have caught up with the October subscriptions and the first part of November, and I’m plugging along on that; apologies if you subscribed and I haven’t answered. I’ll get there. Really and truly.

Steve Barnes has sent what he things is a publishable draft of Black Ship Island, a novella set in the interim between Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. It features an intriguing new alien and some more on the strange ecology of Avalon, and of course has a whacking good story involving the Starborn without the adults. Larry and I discussed this a bit at LASFS last night, and we’ll both take a pass through it, then merge our works. I expect magic from Niven and usually get it. We’re also discussing Anvil (working title; the publication title will almost certainly be something else) and how we might fix the United States if it just had to be done. Imagine that you had that power. What might you do? The devil is in the details…

So things do get done here, if a bit slowly.

NHK satellite CO2 data

no firm conclusions but a little more discussion.

the silence from the media is deafening

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/japanese-satellites-say-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Ron Mullane

Worth looking at, not sure what conclusions are supported. It does seem clear that the remedies involving CO2 production in the US and Europe are not working and will not work.

Of course not everyone seems to agree that this is a subject for rational debate.

http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/28/direct-action-at-harvard/#more-15067 

Sallie Baliunas is a long time friend and a very competent scientist; so of course Harvard students are invited to take direct action against her, rather than engage in rational argument. But then a lot of the students at Harvard don’t seem to have been required to learn much about rational debate.

And if you don’t know about Freefall, you probably should. Start here http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm and for the first few pieces it may seem frivolous or confusing; plug along. It is not only interesting, it invites thought about some very serious matters. It may help to know that Sam, the main character in the first few screens, is not really the main character; and that Sam is unique. He is an intelligent non-human on a planet of millions of Asimov 3-law robots. He isn’t mammalian, either.

I am not a fan of Snopes, but it happens I ran across this the other day. Snopes labels it false or fraudulent or something. I think the story is worth paying some attention to. It is probably made up by someone determined to be anonymous, but there are points made that need making.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/freezing.asp