When I argue for free markets, one of the rebuttals I hear most often goes something like this: “What about children in factories? What about tiny hands in coal mines? Capitalism did that.”
It sounds damning. It feels righteous… And it gets the causation completely backwards.
The people who make this argument assume that childhood was once a protected, carefree period, and then capitalism came along and ruined it. That version of history is a fairy tale. A comforting one, sure. But a fairy tale nonetheless.
Children have worked for as long as human beings have existed. Not because of any economic system, but because of poverty, the universal human condition for most of recorded history. When your family cannot eat without every pair of hands contributing, moral abstractions about the sanctity of childhood become a luxury you cannot afford.
Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist, puts it bluntly in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome: the very concept of “child labor” as a problem would have been incomprehensible to the Romans. Children worked because everyone worked. The idea that childhood should be a separate, protected stage of life is a modern Western invention — one that only became thinkable after societies grew wealthy enough to sustain it.
Medieval Europe was no different.
Children across the continent worked continuously — on farms, in artisan workshops, in households — for centuries before a single factory chimney appeared on the horizon. There was no debate about it. There was nothing to debate. A peasant child who did not work was a peasant child whose family might starve.
In colonial and early America, the pattern held. By age five, children on American farms were expected to contribute labor. Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed at twelve. The arrival of a new child was not merely a blessing — it was, in cold economic terms, the arrival of a future worker.
This was the norm everywhere. In every civilization. For thousands of years.
There is another detail that critics of capitalism consistently leave out: the overwhelming majority of child labor, both historically and today, has occurred within families, not in factories.
The 1900 U.S. Census found that most working children aged 10 to 15 were employed in agriculture. Between 1910 and 1920, over 60 percent of American child workers labored on farms. During the Gilded Age, the very period that critics love to weaponize, two-thirds of all child labor happened on farms, not in factories. Six out of ten male farmhands during that era were working for their own fathers.
E. P. Thompson, a Marxist historian (not exactly a defender of capitalism) acknowledged in The Making of the English Working Class that parents “not only needed their children’s earnings, but expected them to work.” These were not evil people. They were poor people making rational decisions under desperate constraints.
The factory did not invent child labor. It just moved it from dispersed, invisible farmsteads into concentrated, visible buildings where reformers could finally see it — and photograph it.
Ludwig von Mises made this point with characteristic directness in Human Action: the women and children who entered factories were not stolen from comfortable homes. They were “destitute and starving.” The factory was, in his words, their “only refuge” — it “saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.”
That is an uncomfortable truth. But it is the truth.
I can speak about this with a certain authority that most Western commentators cannot, because I have actually witnessed child labor up close. I grew up in Senegal. I know what it looks like.
Roughly 87 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in work — nearly two-thirds of all children in child labor worldwide. 85 percent of it happens in agriculture, children working as unpaid laborers on their own family farms. In many households, income from working children represents 25 to 40 percent of total family earnings. Read that again. A quarter to nearly half of what keeps the family alive comes from the children.
Again, these parents are not villains; they are trapped by poverty.
If you want to understand what this looks like at its most brutal, read Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara spent years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo documenting the conditions in artisanal cobalt mines, the mines that produce a significant share of the cobalt in every lithium-ion battery on earth. What he found was children as young as six digging in toxic pits with their bare hands, earning a dollar or two a day, breathing in dust that will likely kill them. Up to 70 percent of the DRC’s cobalt has some connection to child labor. As Kara himself wrote:
Across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of the global cobalt supply chains.
Now, the instinct of many Western observers is to blame the companies buying the cobalt — Apple, Tesla, Samsung. But blaming the demand side without addressing the supply side misses the point entirely.
Those children are not in the mines because multinational corporations dragged them there. They are in the mines because their families are desperately poor and the DRC has virtually no functioning economic institutions — no enforceable property rights, no rule of law, no competitive labor market that would give these families alternatives.
Which brings me to something I need to address directly: MrBeast’s free breakfast initiative.
In March 2025, MrBeast announced that his company Feastables was giving away free breakfasts at schools in West Africa to get children off cocoa farms and into classrooms. He reported that one school’s attendance rose 10 percent in the first week. He said he had spent two to three thousand hours researching the problem and surrounded himself with “the greatest minds.”
I do not doubt his sincerity, but this approach reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why child labor exists.
As I already argued, attendance going up 10 percent does not mean child labor went down 10 percent. Are those children actually leaving the cocoa farms? Or are they just showing up for the food and then going right back to work after the meal? The metric that matters is not how many children show up at school; it is whether child labor is actually decreasing. And a free breakfast does not change the economic equation that forces children into labor in the first place.
This is the same mistake Western aid organizations have been making for 60+ years. Since 1961, USAID has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building schools, clinics, wells, and roads across Africa.
A child might show up for a free breakfast. But when the school day ends, that same child goes back to work, because the family still needs money. A meal does not pay rent. It does not buy medicine. It does not replace the income that child was generating.
The only intervention that has ever consistently ended child labor at scale is rising household income. When parents earn enough to survive without their children’s wages, they pull their children out of work voluntarily.
Now, here is the part that surprises people most: laws did not end child labor – prosperity did. The laws came after.
The United States tried to legislate child labor away multiple times before it actually disappeared. The Keating-Owen Act of 1916, America’s first federal child labor law, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1918 as unconstitutional. Congress tried again in 1919 using a ‘child labor tax,’ and the Supreme Court struck that down in 1922. A proposed constitutional amendment in 1924 failed to win ratification. It was not until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that federal restrictions on child labor finally stuck — but by then, child labor had already been declining steeply for decades.
Economic historians are explicit about this: the legislation was not the primary driver:
Industrialization and economic growth brought rising incomes, which allowed parents the luxury of keeping their children out of the work force.
Clark Nardinelli found that child labor rates in British cotton and flax factories were already declining for two full decades before the Factory Act of 1833 — the first major child labor law in Britain. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that GDP per capita alone explains 80% of the worldwide variation in child labor rates.
Lawrence Reed summarized the evidence well: child labor was “virtually eliminated” only when “the productivity of parents in free labor markets rose to the point where it was no longer economically necessary for children to work to survive.”
Prosperity did most of the heavy lifting. Laws tended to follow, reinforce, and standardize a trend already underway.
Today, fewer than 10 percent of children worldwide work for a living. That number was essentially 100 percent for most of human history. The decline is one of the great achievements of the modern era, and it was driven overwhelmingly by economic growth.
The children who still work are concentrated in the poorest countries on earth — those with the least economic freedom, the weakest property rights, and the most barriers to trade and entrepreneurship.
Every economic system throughout history has had child labor.
Only free market economies have systematically eliminated it. Not by passing laws first and hoping prosperity would follow, but by generating the prosperity that made child labor economically unnecessary and the laws that followed merely codified a transformation that markets had already set in motion.
If you genuinely want to end child labor in poor countries today, the prescription is not more international regulations, not more bans, and not more charity. It is economic freedom.
Such an important lesson that very few seem to recognise. Factories offered rising incomes to adult and children alike. Whereas child labour was endemic for centuries/millennia previously. Thank you Magatte for driving home this vital historical lesson.
People ignore that people CHOSE to work in factories. Capitalism pretty much singlehandedly created the middle class. There was a small middle class before capitalism. Mostly you were either an aristocrat, or you were a peasant. Factory work was desirable to the poor relative to subsisting on a farm.