True unemployment in the US is around 50% (153 million working people out of 306 million people in the US). A large part of that is children and stay-at-home moms, sure, but I'm also certain a significant number of those people would like to work if they could. Instead, they're stuck in a never-ending loop of collecting welfare to survive instead of working a low-paying job and gaining experience to better themselves. All at the taxpayer's expense. Yay.
You're seriously saying a significant number of children (including young children) want to work?
Is this, like, so hard to believe? Are people in your country so thoroughly brainwashed that kids wanting to work appears baffling or incomprehensible to you?
I worked when I was 14
because I wanted. I was doing software for an uncle already. I got paid, too. I worked at a factory. I walked around the factory whenever I wanted, and I learned the whole process. I even got to use the machines myself -- bandsaws, punch presses, a bunch of other machines that would be considered "dangerous" for a child. Was I a "child slave"?
No offense, but to me, your question is like asking a rape victim "so why is it that you don't want to have sex?", because the answer is exceedingly obvious. Kids don't work today, by and large,
because the State punishes and marginalizes people who allow kids to work in all but the most menial and poorly paid occupations.
This is not a mystery -- you can go and look up the laws that prohibit and / or sabotage children and adolescents from being gainfully employed. If you're a kid looking for paid work but nobody wants to give you a job, it isn't because "people are evil" or "work is not for children" -- it's simply because anyone giving you a paid job gets threatened with jail. Only
certain kinds of jobs are legal for adolescents (but not children!), and even then, there's mountains of paperwork, without which the employer gets put in a cage.
By the way, you can thank union lobbyists for that -- they didn't want the cheap competition, so they had the competition outlawed.
To me it's funny when people appeal to the State to "protect children from labor" -- the State was the very same criminal group of people who
ruined work for adolescents who wanted or needed to work, and they did so exclusively to benefit a political class at the expense of everyone else.
