"Compare to what" is always the question we should keep in mind.
Children worked since the beginning of time, not because of capitalism but because if they didn't they would starve to death. The fact that kids don't have to work is only possible because the productive capacity of each individuals have increased tremendously through capital investment in the factors of production. We have now the luxury of not having to send children to work. Pass a law in a poor country that make kid work illegal and death will follow. (or they'll end up in the black market for prostitution)
Almost everywhere where private property, rule of law and an ease of starting a business has been applied prosperity followed.
Almost everywhere central planning and forced distribution has been applied, starvation and destruction have followed.
This is empirically true. Singapore, Hongkong, Chile, the US, New Zealand, Estonia, etc. are just a few example of what happen when you follow those basic principles.
Could it be better? Of course.
Here are the only options I see now:
- You either focus on making capitalistic infrastructures that bypass government and rewards it's users directly. (Mutual Aid Society Style)
- Give more power to governments...which will attract big business who will want to use that power to maintain their monopoly.
- Create a totalitarian super computer that decides for us where resources should be allocated...whether or not we agree with it. (Venus Project style)
- Stay on the sideline and see how this unfold.
Hey thanks for the comment. The problem with your viewpoint is that you believe that such conditions are necessary. You state that 'children worked since the beginning of time'. Yes this is true, but it is also fallacious. I say that because my point wasn't that children worked, but that the conditions in which they worked were far more dangerous, and detrimental to their health and physical as well as spiritual development now than in the past. For example, when children worked in the past what were they doing?
They weren't assembling typewriters or using scalding chemicals to burn the plastics off the precious metals in computers, they were learning husbandry, farming and construction. Valuable skills that would help them throughout their lives. To boot, because there was no profit motive involved, they only did the work that they needed to do, nothing more. In fact, humans had much more leisure time before capitalism than they do now, because the amount of work to be done was much less, it was finite.
In capitalism the work that must be accomplished is infinite as is the growth desired. Of course, we know that growth and work cannot go on forever, yet we live in a system that tries anyway. Government and capitalism are two arms to the same body: Statism. The idea that you can run people's lives from an office far away from them. How does the farmer decide when to quit? When the tasks for that he set for himself to feed his family are accomplished. How does the wage slave decide when to quit? Well, if he's smart he'll NEVER decide to quit because in capitalism if he does he will be on the street and forced into poverty if he takes more than 2 weeks for himself.
Even your comment lightly assumes that because I'm against capitalism that I must be for centralized planning and distribution. This is because, like all good tools of war, capitalism has an effective propaganda machine. You cannot even envision a world without it that is not overcome by 'socialism', and thus you cannot envision your escape from the matrix. Therefore, you plod along wasting your life and time with no hope nor knowledge of a better way.