By Selwyn Duke
The youngest officer to command a vessel in U.S. naval history, it may shock most to learn, was 12-year-old David Farragut, who served as a prize master in 1812. Such a reality certainly is incongruent with our age, in which 15-year-olds wile away hours playing video games and youth irresponsibility is rife. Mankind’s norm has been for kids to assume adult roles early, however, with the idealization of childhood being a modern phenomenon. But is this “Cult of Childhood,” as one writer put it, actually hurting children? And if “work ennobles man,” as the saying goes, can it also ennoble a man-child?
The left-wing Nation’s Steve Fraser apparently doesn’t think so, and he claims that loosening teen labor laws is partially responsible for a situation he frames in a title thus: “Child Labor in America Is Back—and It’s As Chilling as Ever.” Yet what’s perhaps more chilling is media malpractice that, in Fraser’s case, takes the form of conflating perhaps prudent labor-law reform with the illegal exploitation of migrant minors — and then blaming it all on “capitalism.”
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