Political Memes

That's a great bit of research. What an awesome website.

Interesting and informative site. Thanks

The point is that capitalism prioritizes profit, not the welfare of people. This is only not done anymore because of regulation, not because capitalism was fixed. It can't be fixed. The target goal of capitalism is wrong. Profit does not optimize for innovation, welfare, happiness, or anything else that could be called good. It will always exploit people as much as it can, and it just happens to not exploit children (in the western world (legally)) because we made it not allowed, and disobeying that law would be less profitable.

Don't worry give some states a couple of years and I'm sure we'll see child chimney sweepers come back 😉

We just got rid of chimney sweeps in general.

Despite us regulating child labor it seems like profit motives and greed overpower regulatory measures.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules

Through labor organization. It wasn't out of the goodness of the hearts of benevolent Capitalists, but through struggles of Workers. The point of this picture isn't that Capitalism used to be worse, and fixed itself, but that Capitalists will absolutely take advantage of children and subject them to sacrificing their bodies for clean chimneys if it makes a profit.

The takeaway from this is that Capitalists cannot be seen as individual humans with values, but as cogs in the Capitalist machine that will exploit everything and everyone for profit. An individual Capitalist may not be willing to go that far, but inevitably as long as there is profit to be made, someone will fill that gap.

That's why economic systems need to be looked at at aggregates and not as individual transactions. You miss the forest for the trees.

Now we only have child miners, child slaughter house workers, child assembly line workers, child scrapyard garbage collectors, ...

we just moved child labour to less developed countries. we didn't get rid of anything. you just don't see it, but child labour is still going strong in the world. child slavery as well.

Ah yes and there is no other child labour anywhere in the world at all anymore

What's bad is that even with the preponderance of historical evidence, there are still people who would absolutely return to these practices if the government let them. In many cases they do it anyway.

Leftist organization, regardless of Tendency, proposes numerous solutions. Lower working times for dirty jobs, focusing on automating undesirable jobs as quickly as possible, and rotating who does those jobs are all proposed solutions.

I suggest reading leftist theory.

The left is primarily not concerned with the wealth disparity caused by different wages between jobs. What drives inequality, which makes our society less democratic and just, is the private ownership of capital (meaning means of production in this context). It would be totally fair in a socialist society to add bonuses for harder or more dangerous work. What is not compatible is private ownership, not personal ownership of stuff.