The Basic Organizing Principle of Governments.

Jonah Goldberg makes a solid point:

If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it's that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens "legible."

I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book Seeing Like a State left a lasting impression on me. Scott studied why the state has always seen "people who move around" to be the enemy. Around the world, according to Scott, states have historically seen nomadic peoples, herdsmen, slash-and-burn hill people, Gypsies, hunter-gatherers, vagrants, and runaway slaves and serfs as problems to be solved. States have tried to make these people stay in one place.

But as Scott examined "sedentarization" (making mobile people settle down), he realized this practice was simply part of a more fundamental drive of the state: to make the whole population legible to the state. The premodern state was "blind" to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them. This is why so many rulers pushed for the universal usage of last names starting around 1600 (aristocrats had been using family or clan names for centuries already). The same goes with the push for more accurate addresses, the standardization of weights and measures, and of course the use of censuses and surveys. It's much easier to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, fight crime, and put down rebellions if you know who people are and where they live.

I was writing in the context of the Arizona immigration law, but the same points work just as well in the context of this Department of Labor thing. This wasn't an initiative from the White House, this was simply DOL bureaucrats doing their jobs as they saw fit.

Children on farms are "invisible" to government when government doesn't have rules covering children on farms. By requiring kids to be trained by a federal program instead of 4-H or similar non-governmental agencies, the kids suddenly become visible. Once visible they can be manipulated, organized, directed. (Ironically, 4-H itself is already a government program! But it has embedded itself in civil society, it seems to me, in ways the Department of Labor couldn't countenance.)

It's not altogether different from parents who demand their teenaged kids check in with their parents by phone or text periodically. If you don't hear from your kid, you don't where your kid is. He, in effect, becomes invisible to you. Or think of ex-cons on parole. They need to repeatedly check in with their probation officers, take urine tests, etc. They must remain visible.

But here's the problem: We are not the government's kids! Nor are we presumptive criminals.

As the fact sheet makes clear, the DOL didn't craft this proposal in response to a real problem, it crafted this proposal because this is the sort of thing government agencies do when left to their own devices. They make the population visible, then set about organizing it.