This is so gross

I don’t see a problem with children earning money - the problem kicks in with opinions like this. Expectations shift to assume that if you don’t start earning money as early as possible, you are lazy. (See: the concept of “putting your foot in early”).

Forcing workers to compete with each other rather than oppose the bosses.

If you’ve made $10,000 recycling cans you either have people helping you and bringing you their cans or you’re working an insane amount of hours doing it. If he’d earned a couple hundred dollars doing this that would be different. But this is serious time consuming labor this kid must be doing. It’s not kid stuff. And since education ought to be free he shouldn’t have to save up money for it anyway.

The worst I’ve ever seen this attitude go is, people made an argument that it’s easy to accumulate money quickly, citing the Harvard experiment with students who were given $5 and two hours. As you remember, the winners completely forego the initial sum and 1) make and sell reservations for restaurants at peak hour 2) sell their five-minute presentation time as ad space to a company, making $600.

You can see interesting assumptions about the average person who has $5 that this makes.