General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDo Republicans want American children to work in coal mines 12 hours per day without overtime pay?
I have heard the argument that, during the early stages of the industrial revolution, society was too poor for any alternative, and that children and everybody else had to work very hard for a long time and eventually society became wealthy enough to give us the luxury of outlawing those practices.
However, haven't these people forgotten something?
In 1929 (before much regulation of the financial system existed) and in 2008 (some time after deregulation of the financial system), there were financial crises that affected the real economy, throwing large numbers of people out of work, causing people to lose their homes, reducing real estate prices in many neighborhoods where homes stood vacant, etc.
Consider the period after 1929 that is known as the Great Depression.
(Note that the word "depression" was originally a euphemism for the word "crisis." In economic contexts, the word "depression" no longer has the reassuring quality that it still has in other contexts. Consider the difference between a cliff that an automobile may fall down and a mere depression in the road ahead.)
After 1929, people responded to the economic crisis with the microeconomic virtue known as tightening their belts, but the large-scale (i.e. macroeconomic) effect of such microeconomic virtue was reduced aggregate demand. Savings and investment became disconnected from each other. With deflation, simply hiding cash became a good way to invest money, without producing anything of any tangible or inherent value. With many factories and warehouses operating far below their capacity, it would have been a risky proposition for banks to lend money to people who might have wanted to start new ventures in factories and warehouses that had been liquidated and were sitting abandoned and idle. Lots of money had been invested in stocks, with some shares serving as collateral for other shares in the same stock. When prices dropped, banks were stuck holding the collateral, but banks were just as nervous about stocks as the general public was. Banks continued to sell the stocks and, as a result, securities prices continued a sickening, persistent slide for years and many people were repeatedly shocked to discover, again and again, that the bottom of the stock market had not yet been reached.
People roamed around the country in search of work, prompting FDR to give the advice: "do what you can, with what you have, where you are." Note the last part: "where you are." He could have simply said that people shouldn't travel by hitching illegal rides on trains. Capitalist dynamism involves trailblazers with bold vision who travel along new paths, but in practice America's system had created fear among property owners of vagrants seeking work. Their travel along well-worn paths in search of work to pay for little more than absolute necessities became something too bold, something that needed to be discouraged.
Now, what happens in that kind of economic environment if you kill unemployment insurance, social security, etc?
It won't be a wealthy country. It will be a country that contains some wealthy people, and their wealth belongs exclusively to them, you socialist! It will be a country with plenty of poverty, with adults discouraged and worn out before their time, and in need of retirement money. Surely their twelve-year-old children aren't going to allow them to starve. We just need to get the government out of the way. The government is the problem, remember? Twelve-year-olds would have the opportunity to work in coal mines, for twelve hours per day, six days per week. Millions of people work in coal mines in China, and thousands die at that work every year. If they can do it, then Americans can do it, and owners of American coal mines will no longer need to have two shafts in their mines. It's cheaper to dig one shaft, and if that shaft collapses, then tough luck for the miners trapped inside. A free country has some coal mines with only one shaft.
Do not forget, while we make our plans for a fuzzy and vague dream of libertarianism in the future, every day our policies and our choices create a little bit of reality today. We can begin today with greater freedom and greater inequality. Let freedom ring wherever there are supporters of the policies of Ron Paul. Let freedom ring from every coal mine in America!
One day soon, my friends, we will be able to join hands and sing together, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover, we are free at last!
Note: some elements of style were borrowed from this speech:
http://www.usconstitution.net/dream.html
valerief
(53,235 posts)limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)appleannie1
(5,028 posts)The Rethugs are owned by corporations and corporations can make huge profits hiring children for pennies.
SwampG8r
(10,287 posts)it builds character
Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)Justice wanted
(2,657 posts)They also don't want kids to have education that would allow the kids to become questioning adults. They want to go back to 18-20 hour work days for men and women and make sure no one has a home they own BUT must rent rich men or corporations who own the house or apartments.
Some companies might even want to start going back the Company-towns of so long ago.
DonCoquixote
(13,615 posts)There are many in Dixie who would rather have the old Confederacy back, slave camps and all.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Ecumenist
(6,086 posts)EC
(12,287 posts)grandfather's life (which also describes many in my family in West Virginia) I have to wonder if he really realizes that is a description of exactly what corporations and his party want to do now...only it'll be with debit cards instead of coupons for the company store.
saras
(6,670 posts)Quantess
(27,630 posts)No of course they would be happy to exploit anyone or anything to the fullest extent. They would be okay with bringing back slavery, but this time all races would be eligible to become slaves.
Zoeisright
(8,339 posts)But only OTHER people's children. Not theirs.
CanonRay
(14,013 posts)Maybe once their in condition.
Satire thingy.
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)zbdent
(35,392 posts)This little child wants to be paid?????"
(the above stated in the manner of the old bit in "Oliver Twist"
Be happy you get to hold your "pay" as you walk to the company store to buy overpriced stuff because you can't afford to get in the car to go to Wal-Mart ... because the roads are so bad (you know, elimination of the funding of road repair because the "gas tax" was too high ...)
That's after you pay the fee from the bank to remove some money from your "direct-deposit" account you had to set up "to be paid" for your work. Unless you have a federally-approved "Check-cashing" business nearby, since "big gummint regulations tried to eliminate the legitimate businessmen, the loan sharks ..."
PA Democrat
(13,225 posts)Gov. Corbett cited "Pennsylvania's Gilded Age, a time of industrial might," with some nostalgia in his remarks Dec. 10 at the Pennsylvania Society's yearly steak dinner for lawmakers, lawyers, lobbyists, and business operatives in the fancy Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
It was an appropriate setting. Maybe too appropriate.
The society holds its conclave in New York, as it has since 1899, amid the trappings of the original Gilded Age, when wealthy Pennsylvanians, and the state's finances, were relocating to the nation's metropolis.
The Gilded Age, before income taxes, antitrust prosecutions, and immigration restrictions, was a time of boom-and-bust growth for aggressive upstate timber, coal, and oil operators.
http://articles.philly.com/2011-12-20/business/30531288_1_natural-gas-marcellus-shale-republican-corbett
Canis Mala
(91 posts)To take the country back to the 19th Century. There was a time when we had small government, no unions, poor houses, child labor, slavery and Jim Crowe, silent women and even quieter gays and the states could tell the federal government where to get off. Evidently the GOP has decided that the wisest course for our country in the 21st Century is to re-fight all these battles again because they didn't like the original outcomes. By setting the clocks back to 1789, and observing the original intent of the Constitution (look out blacks and women), they wish to take a mulligan on the last 235 years of our history.
grillo7
(284 posts)I've always been surprised at the hatred for fundamentalist Islam among the right-wing, when, ultimately, they offer pretty comparable visions for the way the world should operate.
Swede
(33,077 posts)The profits!
deacon
(5,967 posts)Tsiyu
(18,186 posts)they think The Gilded Age was a fine time. They are still pissed at labor laws and FDR.
What is really amazing is all of the poor whites I know who agree with them. They'd sacrifice their own kids just to suck up to a rich white guy. They'd sacrifice their own ability to eat just to suck up to elitist Republican scum.
It makes them feel all holy and correct and such.
Around here, they keep voting for their own oppression, and they don't even care to see it.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)treestar
(82,383 posts)On which children you mean. Republican children - no. Blah children - yes.