Not according to economist Ben Powell, and I’m with him (in the abstract).  Of course there are specific cases we should have outrage, but we can’t simply wish that all of the world was wealthy enough for no children to have to work.  Indeed, children working has been part of the human experience since the beginning; its only relatively recently that prosperous countries could outlaw certain types of child labor.  HT to Cafe Hayek

I’ve never known child labor personally, although part of that is because I couldn’t get a part-time job as a kid growing up during the miserable Carter years (but that’s another post!), but I remember a tale my father told me. First of all, my father grew up desperately poor; he was born in 1935, #14 of 16 kids in West Virginia.  All the boys went to work when they were about 12; there were many mouths to feed.  He told me he never had second helpings of food growing up, but always had enough to eat.  My mother made my dad his very first birthday cake after they were married; a birthday cake was a luxury they could not afford.  After all, with 16 kids, somebody’s going to have a birthday all the time!  My father quit school in the 8th grade because he got tired of being whipped every day by his teacher for not having done his homework, but he worked from 3-11pm every day.  Yes that was a different era.  So at 12 years old, his older brother got him a job at the Pepsi factory with him.  He worked full time until he was 66 years old.  He passed away last year, in part because at 80 he was still out working (when he had no need), and fell down and broke his hip (and subsequently got pneumonia and passed away).

But the story of interest was before he went to work at Pepsi.  My grandfather, the lumberjack, took my dad out to work one day, and they were using a two man saw (a long saw with handles on both ends) to cut through a tree.  The idea is to pull the saw for your cut, while the other partner would then pull it back–you didn’t have to work “pushing” the other direction.  Well my dad, who at the time was about 10, was getting tired so he started slacking off.  My grandfather warned him once, but after a while he started slacking off again.  So my grandfather whipped him.  Yes, he beat him because the child wasn’t working hard enough.  Was this wrong?  My dad never thought so.  In his eyes, it was part of what made him a man.   He had nothing but respect for a man who worked so hard to get a very poor family through.  We almost can’t imagine that today.  But knowing my dad, I share his value judgment–my grandfather did the right thing–both in using child labor and punishing him for slacking off.   But maybe I just don’t get it.