"you and your peers would have had more time to spend on education and the net personal and economic benefits would have been positive."

I think you drastically underestimate the value of work as it related to self actualization, determination and long term success as an adult.

Fortunately, we have a bit of an A/B test going on in America right now - rural youth in many parts of the country have no meaningful work and no home-economic structure into which to pour their energy and time. News headlines lead me to believe this is going poorly:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/opioid-crisis-epidemic...

> If you took the children out of the mines the cobalt would still get mined. The owners would find technology and process efficiencies to stay price competitive, if those don't exist then the price of mobile phones should go up.

You talked about the mine owners and the price of phones, but what about the children and their families? What would they have to do?

Go to school.

If there's no schools then there's not enough tax being drawn from the mine, so tax the mine (or cobalt exports). You do that until the point smartphones become unaffordable (which we are really, really far off).

Except that's not what happens because it's not in the West's interest and there's enough influence over dictators etc. to keep it that way.

Right. So it's not what happens. It's the DRC, it's mine cobalt or starve.

What's your point, unless you were actually agreeing with the parent?

That's exactly what happens when you snatch up the commons and parcel it out to private and governmental actors, depriving people of the means of their own self-sustenance, thus turning them into a landless class that have to sell their labor in order to survive.

If only there were an alternative to this inevitable, natural, inexorable economic process. Too bad there isn't.

the parent is implying that this is the way it is, the way it was and the way it always will be (and backs it up with a personal anecdote). That's not the case though - it is possible to remove a dictator, it is possible to stop wars, it is possible to change employment laws, it is possible to send children to school and it is possible to change the world for the better. And it's not a theory.

Your "let them go to school" is the equivalent of "let them eat cake": if they could go to school they probably wouldn't be working in a mine in the first place :/.

If you want to try to solve the problem through some random intervention you need to take a step back and fix whatever is preventing them from going to school, not arbitrarily taking away their jobs and then patting yourself on the back for a problem solved.

Taking away the job does solve the problem though, because the cobalt must come from somewhere, so the mine will increase prices to pay for the new labour they need. And the tax from this will pay for the schools.

The ultimate reason it doesn't happen is because people in the west don't want to pay more for their smartphone (they are not to blame though, as they won't see this picture, our politicians, corporations and planners are the groups that maintain this picture deliberately).

You are talking about a country with child soldiers and indentured service. Your perfect-sphere-of-a-market is even further from reality than in developed countries.