When it comes to the behavior of Republican-dominated state legislatures, very little surprises me at this point. Every few weeks, GOP lawmakers around the country find a creative new way to attack public education or make life harder for marginalized groups. It’s all disgusting. None of it is unexpected.

Resurrecting child labor, though, is a depth of grotesquery I wouldn’t have predicted in the third decade of the twentieth century. Yet here we are. A range of GOP-led states, writer Jordan Barab reports, are weighing laws to “decrease the age and increase the hours at which children could work dangerous jobs.”

That’s repugnant on many levels: Most obviously, it will lead to avoidable human suffering. It will also make our society less equal. But what matters just as much, though it might be less obvious, is that a society in which financially desperate families send their children to do dirty and dangerous jobs at younger and younger ages is also less free.