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Comment by bugglebeetle | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism means a society ruled by Capital owners, who happen to love child labor. That’s the justification. It makes them money, so it’s good!

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This kind of knee jerk snarky comment doesn’t really contribute to the conversation at all. If you want to make that point, make it better.

Unless you can prove them wrong, the parent's is still right: these child labor laws have been revoked to benefit a minority's financial interests.

>these child labor laws have been revoked to benefit a minority's financial interests.

The children's?

It's the burden of the person putting forward a proposition to prove it, or at least provide some kind of argument or evidence. It's not the burden of everyone else to disprove it. Think about what that world looks like.

How would one contribute to the conversation better than stating what is plainly true: child labor laws are being repealed because Capital owners want them to be and pay politicians to make it so. Is it more useful to engage with whatever sophistry is used to justify their repeal as if it was legitimate or well-reasoned?

I think it was a point well made. It’s not an outlandish or niche idea. It’s lacking neither in plenty of readily available academic source material nor major cultural works. The only thing which would make it a claim so extraordinary that it begs special citation is on the presumption that capital’s appetite for child labor decreases along with regulatory structures limiting it. But that’s self evidently untrue. The only thing limiting that appetite has been regulation, and the appetite has both informed deregulation advocacy and taken advantage when such advocacy succeeds.

But all of that should be taken as read, unless a reader is inclined to disregard a vast wealth of relatively uncontroversial documentation of labor history.

It's not quite snarky, it's more reductionist. He's making two assertions: (1) Capitalism tends to shift power to those with capital, and (2) those with capital tend to benefit from cheap child labor. Will you argue against his central points, or will you dismiss them based on how they were delivered?

Unless you define capitalism as “things I don’t like” then

1) broad individual freedoms have advanced the most in capitalist countries and those freedoms have not seen monitonic decrease since some founding date, rather have seem back and forth swings with a general trend towards more individual freedom in long time scales

2) child labor laws were enacted first in capitalist countries and continue to be stronger in capitalist countries

I don’t see any rebuttal to these that don’t boil down to defining capitalism narrowly enough to exclude countries/economies that the commenter likes more and instead they would define as some brand of socialism.

Capitalism I’m defining here broadly as an economy characterized primarily by individual ownership of resources and production.

Of course it contributes to the conversation:

1- it calls a spade a spade: we already have theories of how Capitalism works, and none of the other replies named it. Giving a name to the problem is the first step in fighting it.

2- it explicitly calls out: "it makes them money", which is also factual and not explicitly mentioned by the other comments. They mention a "perceived labor shortage", but it doesn't clarify the fact that fighting that gets more money in the pocket of some people

Of course, the grandparent comment should've been a bit clearer in how this makes people money. I think the answer is twofold:

1- it increases the reserve army of labor

2- the minimum wage is often lower for younger people (the excuse is that this is training for them)

Yes, they love child labor for material reasons, not villainous ones: it generally costs less money or puts downward pressure on the price of competing labor.

Socialists will attribute any societal problem to capitalism. Of course, capitalist critics online will never mention that capitalism drives down labor demand by incentivizing technological innovation.

“Societal problem” is doing a lot of work in your comment. Politicians repealing child labor laws so that corporations don’t have to pay more money for workers is not a “societal problem,” but one resulting from the naked reality of the wage relation.

> Of course, capitalist critics online will never mention that capitalism drives down labor demand by incentivizing technological innovation.

I’d be delighted to concede that if it were true. To the extent capitalism does relieve demand for labor, it perpetually creates more demand however artificially, often explicitly on the arbitrary basis of labor itself as duty. To the extent it has yielded to a constant or increased demand for labor, it’s been a result of resistance to capitalism.

Ok so why has the average work day been dropping since the industrial revolution began.

If you respond with: well unions fought for it:

I'd say, that's partially true, but it wouldve only been possible if production efficiency grew, which it has been continuously over the past 300 years... because capitalism is the strongest driver of technological innovation.

Secondly, this whole thing about artificial demand is bunk because you aren't forced to consume it in the first place. You are free to live the life of a 19th century man, and you really don't have to work very hard for it, because producing 19th century level goods is very very cheap.

I apologize for being glib but… your response sounds more like it was written by Marx than anything I could have written. It’s exactly his premise. Capitalism was a prerequisite for Marxist socialism precisely because of its productive qualities. Marxist Socialism was specifically conceived to address the way that disproportionately benefits a class of owners versus the class of workers who implement capitalism’s efficiencies.

I'd be happier if more socialists actually read Marx. However, to your point. Marx thought that once our production ramped up enough, we could have everything we needed and overthrow our capital demons. He also thought that there was a ceiling to production innovation and that profits would eventually dry up due to competition.

But its been 150 years and none of that is true, we're still getting better at doing things, and human appetite for consumption hasn't really slowed down. Some part of that is hierarchical, some people just want to be better than others and so their consumption is relative. This is where a lot of artificial scarcity is manufactured. But we still continue to solve very real problems, much of which is fueled by a capitalism.

> But its been 150 years and none of that is true, we're still getting better at doing things, and human appetite for consumption hasn't really slowed down.

Citation needed.

There have been several innovations since Marx's days, creating new products and services. And the population kept growing and growing.

We're almost 8 billion people now. That by itself increases demand and opens new market (of course, improvements in logistics, shipping and communications are also what allows for actually opening new markets in countries previously underserved).

"Software is eating the world", was true enough.

But all services have been digitalized (not only private, but also the public administration), so I think that Software already ate the whole world.

In a few decades, the population will also stop growing, and that will inevitably cause problems to those who have to try to find new markets to grow their production.

So, the tendency of rate of profit to fall does not prevent the rise of companies like Google and Netflix. But even they have stopped growing as much as they did before, because they expanded to half of the world already, and now to increase profits they have to (for example): substantially increase advertisement in YouTube and crack down on password sharing for Netflix.

Another component in their fight for profits, is reducing labor costs: we just started to see that happen with generalized layoffs in the tech sector (of course, that was just a small blips, there's a lot more to come in the next few decades).

"Solve very real problems" is noble and a nice thought... But not all problems can be solved in a way that generates profits. The ceiling is not something that we will hit suddenly with a shock. The gradual trickle of innovations will continue

So the argument is that since this criticism came from presumably a socialist, which we have no evidence for, we should not consider the criticism on its own merit?

I literally responded to the parent argument though. And yes I do assume vocal critics of capitalism online to be socialist, I'm happy for parent to prove me wrong :)

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