A Thousand Points of Blight

In April the federal Department of Labor (DOL) announced it had undercounted the number of violations of the child labor law found in a three-day sweep conducted the month before. The department revised the number of violations, from 7,000 to 11,000, with fines close to $3 million. Yielding to congressional pressure, the DOL listed the names of
violators, congressional committees held hearings, and the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report with some horrifying statistics. In the America of the 1990s, can we be returning to conditions of early industrial America? Of course we can. And we are!

According to the new GAO study, the number of illegally employed children was almost 22,500 in 1989, up from 9,200 in 1983 an...