CAPITALISM FOR MEN, INDENTURED SERVITUDE FOR THEIR FAMILIES

You'd think that the bastion of capitalism known as The Wall Street Journal would oppose indentured servitude and support the free enterprise system.

But alas, it isn't so. Scratch a WSJ journalist and under the skin you find a frantic socialist. A believer in the Marxist mantra, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

If you don't believe this, reread the August 26-27, 2006 WSJ piece called "Allowances: Not Child's Play" by Christina Binkley. Defending the concept of allowances, she writes, "For instance, do you want to 'pay' allowances in return for chores or doing homework? Many financial advisors frown on that, on the theory that duties like those should be just plain obligatory."

Wow! Where did that 19th century theory come from?

Probably from the family farm version of indentured servitude, which assigned women and children an extraordinary range of difficult -- and often dangerous -- duties and chores for which there was no compensation.

The family farm was supposed to produce its own food, its cash crops and at least three male heirs. (Boys were considered assets, girls were mere liabilities.) The greatest burden of work was born by women. The "weaker sex" was required to cook, clean, sew, mend, tend the garden, milk the cows, raise the children and help with the planting and harvesting. In order to produce three full-grown sons, she had to bear at least ten children. Half would be girls and three or four would be felled by disease and accidents before reaching maturity. Think of the pregnant farm wife fetching heavy pails of water from the well and being forced to sit on milking stools in winter twice a day in the icy barn. During much of the 19th century, a farmer would wear out two or three wives over his lifetime.

There would be no Saturday nights in town for the farm woman, who was kept home by the cows lowing to be milked. (The first feminist was the 19th century farm wife who issued the mantra, "Never marry a man who keeps cows.") Circuit-riding Methodist preachers threatened "hell, fire and brimstone" on men who did not observe the Sabbath, but they never included women in that part of the sermon. Women were expected to work seven days a week, and go to church, too. After the big Sunday dinner, men napped while women scrubbed the dishes or did the sewing.

Women were never paid for their "duties and chores," an anti-capitalistic tradition which all too often exists today. Instead, they are given an allowance for managing the house and paying the bills. (Capitalism can be restored to the family when women hire divorce lawyers skilled in forensic accounting. The "back pay" awards can be astounding.)

The tradition of ill-using children on the family farm should have been a national scandal. While Congress and the states were dragooned into passing the child labor laws, the family farm was carefully excluded from such legislation. While it became unlawful to kill, maim, starve and overwork children in the nation's factories, farmers continued to merrily kill, maim and overwork their children, unobstructed by society or the law. Studies show that farm work is extraordinarily dangerous for children. A youngster losing his arm in a thresher or getting run over by a tractor is a fairly common occurrence. No one will ever know how many farm kids contracted anthrax by working with farm animals, but the anthrax epidemics of the 1890s were horrendous. Overwork has compromised many a farm child's immune system, making him more susceptible to flu, pneumonia, smallpox, diphtheria and a whole host of bacterial and viral diseases.

Families thought it perfectly permissible to exploit and cheat their own children. When I was a boy, my brother and I were packed off to the town of Northeast, Pennsylvania, to pick cherries in my grandpa's orchard. We had to climb the trees with our splints under one arm and reach the tallest branches, the ones no adult in his right mind would attempt. It was very dangerous work, but my parents never objected to this kind of child exploitation. Grandpa paid the adult pickers 25 cents a splint, while the kids got only 10 cents "because we were only children." Making things worse, Grandma would yell at us to come down the tree with "well-rounded splints." Then she would sweep our cherries into the under-filled splints of my lazy uncle.

Then one day, brother Bob had had enough. The injustice of doing the hardest, riskiest work and getting cheated finally got to him. After descending from his tree, Bob marched angrily over to Grandma, who was sitting on the ground. He threw his splint down, and stamped on it, crushing the cherries. He yelled, "You dirty, stinky, smelly old rat, I'm never going to pick cherries for you ever!"

And he never did. Grandpa got out his leather strop and was going to give Bob a beating, but Mother stepped up, shoved a fist under Grandpa's nose and threatened to belt him "a good one." Facing this fierce Croat with her war feathers flying, Grandpa had the good sense to look out for his own safety and back off. Those were pretty violent times, intra-family beatings being quite common.

Today's warped ideas about child allowances were born centuries ago on the family farm. Although revered in myth and fabled as a part of "the good old days," the family farm was a blasphemy against women, children -- and capitalism.

If you feel I've been too harsh on the farmer and his tradition of allowances, consider this:

How would you like to start a business staffed by you and nine workers you didn't have to pay? No payroll. No benefits. No payroll taxes. No Worker's Comp. No rent. How rich do you think you would get? Throw in federal subsidies and you'd have it made in the shade.

That, in essence, is the deal we handed the family farmer.

Yet the farmer rarely got rich. He failed because he was brought up by his father to perform free labor or get a small allowance. As a result, he grew up to be a big, dumb kid without any comprehension of money and asset management. He skimped on his wife and children while wasting gobs of money on oversized tractors, trucks, harvesters and all kinds of equipment he really didn't need. Buying a bigger picker "to save time" without realizing his tractor was too small to pull the heavier weight was a common money management failing which hurt the farm family while enriching International Harvester. The average family farmer lusts for shiny new equipment the way a child lusts for shiny new toys. Free child labor produces financially crippled men.

A hundred years ago, half our population was engaged in agriculture. Now only 2.5 percent of us work on a farm. Thanks be to the corporate farm.

Now if only the tradition of house money for women and allowances for kids would disappear, too.

Too many allowance-influenced children have grown up to become big, dumb kids who are up to their chins in debt because they view credit cards as "instant allowance" cards. They have become urban versions of the family farmer.

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