This sort of thing has become all too typical of the Obama administration: “Kids may be banned from even the most simplest of farm related tasks and experiences“:
The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.
Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”
“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”
Via Eric Odom, who aks the same sort of silly questions I might ask:
- How is it that we have a government that believes it’s their business to ban such activities that occur at the will of parents, on private property?
- Why do we not have conservative Republicans in D.C. demanding an instant stop to such horrific proposals?
- Why do liberals think this is a fruitful idea?
Naturally, those who believe in the Constitution are asking just where the federal government derives the power to do this. (I’d say from the same place it derives the power to tell us what we can put in our bodies and what health care we have to have, but I am sick and tired of repeating myself to no avail. Meaning I can do nothing to stop it other than complain, run for office, or other ineffective activities.)
It makes me very angry to see what made this country great being systematically eliminated.
Comments
10 responses to “The power to criminalize family chores”
Last Halloween, my 4 year old granddaughter drove her just-learned-to-walk baby sister in a “power take-off” pink Barbie ‘jeep’ around a suburban neighborhood to go trick-or-treating.
It was adorable (I’ve got photos and I can prove it), but would be illegal had they lived on a farm under these rules.
I can’t wait to see whether Pioneer Woman (http://thepioneerwoman.com/) speaks out against this travesty or whether she removes posts and photos of her children operating farm equipment.
http://thepioneerwoman.com/blog/2007/07/ford_power_girl/
while it lasts
Considering the chore my non-rancher, non-farmer father had me do one summer when I was 12… that is nothing!
And I envy those kids. They are having fun.
Great comments, Donna. Thanks!
Silly, the conservative Republicans want the kids to be janitors.
Do progressive Democrats want to eliminate all jobs, even janitorial ones?
It’s for this kind of reason I’m basically libertarian.
Thankfully the outcry has already caused the administration to withdraw their plans, as your very link says at the top. I wrote about it here: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2012/04/the-right-to-work-on-a-farm/
What I immediately thought was, does this apply also to all sorts of typical volunteer work, including planting, composting, recycling, clearing city lots or highway roadsides or public parks, habitat-type homebuilding, etc. No? Why not? Obviously, moving “farm product raw materials” cannot be logically differentiated from much of the work that kids might otherwise be urged—nay, required—to do as part of service to others and “giving back” (urk). Not that there’s anything wrong with that; our son just returned from a religious school-based trip to New Orleans where they did do a ton of hard manual labor.
_
The very heart of your writing while apnaeripg reasonable at first, did not settle perfectly with me after some time. Somewhere throughout the sentences you actually managed to make me a believer but only for a while. I still have a problem with your leaps in logic and one might do well to help fill in those breaks. In the event that you can accomplish that, I will undoubtedly end up being fascinated.