Just a quick, not-quite-random thought tonight. Actually been chewing on this for a while.
As you teach your children what it means to be a believer, I trust that one of the qualities you are instilling in them is the will to work hard, and the love of work. Work is an honorable, even sacred activity. God worked, we work. It's part of bearing His image.
Unfortunately, American culture has stacked the deck against families who desire to teach their children how to work. Because of abuses from centuries past (such abuses still exist in many other countries), we now have all kinds of laws that get in the way of your child getting and holding a job.
I'll never forget that when we lived in Pennsylvania, we had to go to our teenager's high school to get permission for them to work. Why is it any of their business? Who gave the school system the right to have any say in what my child does when they are not on the school property? I found this intrusiveness frankly outrageous. To be quite honest with you, I might have simply ignored the requirement. Don't really remember.
To make matters worse (much, much worse), our elected representatives also seem to think they can dictate to businesses the minimum-wage that they can pay their workers. To the liberal mind, this makes good sense. To those who actually have good sense, however, the minimum-wage eliminates jobs that our kids could do; jobs which would teach them the value and discipline of work. Employers can't afford to pay unskilled teens the minimum wage - the value of their labor simply is not worth the money.
To see the relationship between the minimum-wage and teen unemployment, check out this blog post by Professor Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan.
When teens don't learn to work hard, they learn to become dependent on mom and dad. When they leave home (if they leave home), that dependency transfers to their uncle. You know the guy, name of Sam - Uncle Sam.
There is a correlation between the intrusive child-labor laws, the minimum-wage, and the ever-growing dependency class in America. We need to overthrow these ridiculous laws, fire the meddling bureaucrats who write the ridiculous regulations, and unemploy the legislators who conceive of such rubbish in the first place.
We should send them home to work, at the minimum wage.
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