Whitaker's 12/4/99 Articles

Bob Whitaker's Weekly Articles – November 20, 1999

December 11, 1999 – THE DISMAL SCIENCE LOOKS AT CHILD LABOR

December 11, 1999 – WHITAKER'S LAW ON HISTORY

THE DISMAL SCIENCE LOOKS AT CHILD LABOR

Liberals tell us that women used to be looked at as mere child producers. What stopped this, we are told, was liberal policy.

In the real world, the reason women once had to devote most of their lives to nothing but child producing was because they had to have so many children just to keep the population from dying out. Queen Anne of England in the early eighteenth century had eighteen children, and not one of them lived to adulthood. It was not merely poverty-level women whose infants died. The Queen was not a poverty-level person. And it was not liberal sympathy for the poor which reversed this enormous infant mortality.

We are given the impression today that the only reason wages went up in the last century was because of the labor movement and the New Deal. Like most media commentary, this puts cause and effect backwards. Labor unions were only able to get wages higher because productivity went up. More important, wages had been rising steadily for centuries before the New Deal or the rise of unions to national power.

Economics has been called the Dismal Science. One of the things that makes it so dismal is the fact that serious economic analysis destroys the happy story that all you need to be rich and happy is idealistic politicians.

An international protocol has just been signed by the Clinton Administration to abolish child labor throughout the world. Sounds great. Only a student of the Dismal Science would destroy the wonderful atmosphere by asking, "So what happens to the kids?"

If you believe the standard theory that everybody is better off only because "idealists" signed idealistic papers, the banning of child labor in third world countries is just another great advance.

The assumption is that, once child labor is abolished, the children will live happily ever after. The problem is that, in the countries where child labor is being abolished, none of the TECHNICAL and ECONOMIC advances that REALLY allowed us to abolish child labor have taken place. In the countries where there is child labor, people are routinely allowed to starve to death.

This reminds me of an exchange in the old "Pogo" comic strip. One character says, "The Constitution guarantees I can say whatever I want to say." The other character replies, "Yeah, but it don't say nothin' about what happens to you AFTER you says it."

Child labor in many places will now be abolished. But what happens AFTER to the children thus freed from it? The experts and "idealists" who pushed this through feel they have done their jobs. Since they signed a paper, all the kids' problems are over.

I am certainly not saying child labor shouldn't go as soon as possible. I am just saying that when upper-income "idealists" and "experts" have their way, they tend to hurt those they think they are helping.

If we believe that all that is needed to make the world better is for idealists to sign papers, there is no problem. But that view of the world is bad history. And when bad history becomes policy, it kills people.

WHITAKER'S LAW ON HISTORY

Timothy McVeigh's mother just announced that people who were in the buildings that were bombed in Oklahoma City should "get over it." Naturally, everybody was appalled, and her history of mental illness was used as an excuse.

But McVeigh's mother is simply expressing the same view about her son that the media always takes toward LEFTISTS who commit violence. Has anybody every heard anyone even bother to criticize the Unibomber? That gentleman was 1) a Harvard graduate and 2) an environmentalist fanatic. He did his mail bombings in the name of environmentalism. Not only have I never heard any expression of outrage in the media, I have never heard the man CRITICIZED in the media. I have heard some laudatory remarks on some talk shows about how he lived with nature in the raw, but otherwise nothing.

One businessman got his hands blown off by the Unibomber. He admitted he had been a trendy type himself until that happened. He was appalled by the indifference of the media to this murderer and maimer. He wrote a book about the situation.

While McVeigh and the nuts who do school shootings are regularly tied in with "rightist hate groups," the Unibomber has never been mentioned in connection with leftist "environmentalists."

By the same token, no one has linked the rioting thugs destroying things in Seattle with other "environmentalists." When people begin destroying things in the name of this popular leftist cause, there is never any conjecture that the radical environmentalist rhetoric may be responsible. But if a kid shoots up a school, it is entirely the fault of right wingers and of gun owners.

Out in Seattle, they are rioting in the name, among other things, of saving the environment. How did people find an excuse to riot and destroy things in the name of preserving nature? To find out why they are so violent, you need only read the words of our Vice President. In his book, he says evil industrialists and other exploiters must be stopped at all costs. He says they are destroying the world. If he were a right winger, he would be accused of inciting violence.

Let me add something that will really surprise you:

Respectable conservatives don't object to all this. They are too busy apologizing.

According to the media, all violence on the right is caused by the inherent and historical evil of right wing ideas. On the left, there is no such cause and effect.

I have formulated this as Whitaker's Law on History:

"Any historical incident will be remembered to the exact extent that it serves to promote a leftist cause."

Many businessmen and church officials collaborated with Hitler fifty years ago, when he had their lives in his hands. No leftist will ever let us forget that. But I remember when most Western European "intellectuals" were outright Stalinists or had openly Communist sympathies.

Communists who stated flatly that they were Communists dominated the Italian movie industry. French and Italian universities were dominated by this kind of thinking and openly so.

With the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, many French intellectuals were repelled by the violence of the Stalinist regime. But their remarks saying this made it clear that, for decades, they had been admirers of Stalin.

But no one ever blames these collaborationist professors who backed the Communists a little over two decades ago. Condemning leftist "intellectuals" would harm leftism. Blaming Nazi collaborators who are long since dead serves a leftist purpose in discrediting religion and capitalism.

So the word "collaborator" is never used to describe Communist collaborators during the Cold War.

Media history does not include the word "collaborator" unless it means someone who worked with the extreme right over half a century ago.

I am sure the reader can come up with a dozen examples like this.

We hear a lot about the campaign to abolish slavery, but we never hear about the factories that financed that campaign. Women and children worked fourteen hours a day in the New England factories that produced the money that was used by financiers to support John Brown. If a woman or a child was crippled in one of those factories, as often happened, there was no workers' comp.

When abolitionism triumphed abruptly in 1865, the death rate among blacks just as abruptly doubled. The black population, which had doubled regularly every twenty-five years under slavery, immediately stagnated. Blacks were subjected to the same rules abolitionists maintained for their own workers, and they died like flies.

But this history serves no leftist purpose, so it is quietly forgotten.

Until World War I, about ninety percent of the blacks in America were in the South. The South was kept subject and poverty-stricken by the combination of discriminatory rail rates and high tariffs I discussed on October 23, 1999 in "McCain Waves the Bloody Shirt At Buchanan." Ninety percent of blacks were included in that subjection and poverty. But don't look for this to be discussed in any history class, least of all Black History.

As a result of Whitaker's Law on History, what little education media people are subjected to discusses cause and effect only to the extent it serves the cause of the left. It is no surprise that they apply the same rule in reporting.