When the government intervenes in the economy, it creates perverse incentives and misdirects resources.But some economic regulations unquestionably improved the standard of living — including prohibitions on child labor.Happy April Fool’s Day.In truth, laws against child labor lead to far worse conditions for the children they claim to protect.No respectable parents want their progeny to toil in the workforce during their formative years.But for the majority of humanity’s 100,000-year existence, this was a luxury none could afford. By 1800, 95 percent of Americans still had to work in agriculture, according to Cox and Alm’s “Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think.”At these family farms, child labor was necessary for survival.It’s easy to shed motherly tears for the working conditions of the Industrial Revolution factories in Britain and America, but it’s important to remember these workers chose to move to the cities because they were the safest, best-paying jobs the economy offered.In fact, writers of the day commended factory owners for providing jobs for women and children.As free-market economist Murray Rothbard wrote, “This praise was not due to their being inhuman monsters; it was due to the fact that, before such labor was available, and in those regions where such labor was not available, the women and children were living and suffering in infinitely worse conditions. Women, children, immigrants, after all, were not driven to the factories with whips; they went voluntarily and gladly.”Regulations prohibiting child labor do not save children from the mines. They force them to choose between starvation and the black market. The only benefactors are factory workers who face less competition. This is why unions — not genuinely concerned citizens — led the fight to outlaw non-farm child labor.Child labor regulations also have adverse effects on the macro-level. For people to own more things, more things must be created. This requires an increase in productivity — the amount created per worker.The easiest way for this to happen is through an increase in capital goods — goods used for the production of other goods rather than as ends in themselves.On the consumption side, poor countries lack the resources to buy the luxuries we enjoy.But from the production side, they lack the ability to create enough things for prices to be bid under the budget of less-affluent workers.With savings come investment and vast increases in productivity. Only after going through this transition can poor countries develop the ability to become rich countries.In America, this happened between 1860 and 1890 when the “second Industrial Revolution” vastly decreased the average workweek, and real earnings increased by roughly 60 percent, according to “History of the American Economy.”From this logically necessary framework, discussions on child labor take a sharp turn to the right of standard assumptions. Safe working conditions and what we would consider “fair” wages are expensive.They can only be afforded after massive growths in the capital stock. In America, Britain, South Korea, Hong Kong and much of what we now consider the first world, that capital stock was accumulated through a relatively laissez-faire economy.Child labor and sweat shops are not aesthetically pleasing, but they are better than the alternatives. Without them, the necessary growth in the capital stock is even more Herculean.The progress that allows citizens to enjoy childhood comes not from legislation at the top, but from hard work at the bottom.Prosperity only comes from sweat and savings.And that’s no joke.Daniel  Morgan is a 21-year-old economics junior from Baton Rouge.
–Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]