Ep. 58 In defense of Child Labor. Is it any worse then schooling?

The Mindcrime libertyshow discusses child labor both historically and in the future.  Swithun starts by discussing a mises institute article which chronicles how some of the worst aspects of child labor in England described by Charles Dickens had to do with functionally state mandates not "free market" capitalism.   

 

"Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses for which it was largely responsible. Once more, government was "a disease masquerading as its own cure." To their credit, some reformers realized that regulations to help the poor did precisely the opposite. "

https://mises.org/library/legal-child-abuse

 

We continue our discussion with pointing out that scarcity is a historic fact which few people other then right libertarians will acknowledge.   Its only recently that society has been rich enough to have significant portion of the population doing "useless" work.  That useless work is known as mass schooling which for many people is quite alienating work involving tests and papers which they don't care to take and the teacher doesn't care to administer.  Is this any better than many current jobs? At least with a job you get paid and something productive is produced.  It is true that if one wants a high paying job and one isn't an innovator the only real way is to get a good education for a skill.  Funnily enough mass schooling tends to fail many of the people it claims to help and is a kind of jail anyways for disgruntled non academic persons in particular young men of all races and many backgrounds.  Would these people be any better off working?   How would that effect the immigration debate if one had an increase in effective working hours?