Shouldn't this be how the government runs it anyway? What happens when that private company gets shut down for fraud or someone embezzles money from it?
There are an awful lot of people who can't take care of themselves including people who are going to throw their money down a rat hole thinking they're going to make a killing in some sort of investment. This could be risky stocks or scam schemes or just plain bad luck. You've got to guarantee that somehow all these people will have something for their retirement that will assure them of at least some minimal living standard. Now, come up with that.
I've got two college buddies that went to work for PGE that got royally screwed in that deal. One rose to the level of a high level executive managing Portland's World Trade Center. I lost track of the other who only wanted to work there as an engineer and get out with enough money to start a hardware store. What a disaster the Enron incident caused.
No, we don't need most child labor laws. As you have pointed out before, most products we buy are from China ,where all children are slaves and there are no child labor laws there. Same with safety laws, none in China and your pc works just fine! Nobody you know died making it, so...cool. I worked in berry and bean fields, mowed lawns, painted houses, every summer from the age of 7. My sons were irrationally forbidden by law from doing most of that, in order to create a false market of "jobs Americans won't do" to justify allowing a slave market of illegal aliens working under the table.
I had a newspaper route at 10. Sold papers in and out of restaurants, bars and taverns in Oswego. Started mowing lawns at 11 and picked strawberries at 9, 10, 11 and 12. I remember one time when I was 9, I helped my friend deliver his Sunday papers. Afterward it was still pretty early in the morning and we tried going to the park but a policeman told us we had to go home until a certain time in the morning. Some kind of curfew law. Oh yeah, I also picked up bottles for their return deposit. This earned me enough money to go to the movies, buy bus tokens from Rose City Transit and pay a guy who was somewhere around 20 enough money so he could buy gas and take us kids to Sauvie Island to go swimming.
