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Libertarian Child Protection?
A big thanks to everyone who contributed to the "Libertarian Enforcement Theory?" thread. I've got some other things I've been wondering about that I thought I'd submit for your comment.
I wanted to open a discussion about how (or if) children are to be protected from negligent, abusive or sadistic parents in a libertarian world. Sadly, such things do exist. Now, I’m sorry that I always need to provide this caveat, but experience has shown it is required. Please don’t insult me with kindergarten like observations on all the harms by the state’s child protection agencies. (D’uh. Oh, wow, how smart of you.) Shocking though it may be to some, yes, I know.
If our best answer is that a stateless society is no better or worse than a state governed one in protecting children, just bad in different ways, so be it. That would be unfortunate, though, and I’m wondering if we couldn’t do better. Though, at this point, I haven’t a clue how.
So let’s start with first principles. Defining children as born (I don’t want to drag the abortion debate into this) and too young to be emancipated and care for themselves, does a libertarian society provide any protection in theory or practice for children subject to abuse of their parents or legal guardians? Are they merely the property of adults to use as they see fit, like any other property? If not, who intervenes, how and with what libertarian justification? Your thoughts would be appreciated.
And, as always, any suggested reading greatly welcomed.
B.C.'ing you.
I hate to sound like a Citizen X clone, but the market will figure it out.
I am sympathetic to where you are coming from, though. And as someone who would LOVE to live in a stateless society, I think we *NEED* to have these discussions. I'd hate to get there someday and all of us are standing around shaking our heads like, "Okay, what do we do?"
I actually had a disussion with Mark and Ian from FTL a few days ago about protecting underage girls (and boys, too) from sexual predators. I know how I would like to help my community.
When I was in college I studied quite a bit about sex. My first semester I took Human Sexuality and my last one I took a class called "Women and Work in the Sex Industry" and, well I won't go into details about the class here. But, you can guess what it was about based on the name. I never really dated much in college so that gave me time to do a lot of studying on the subject. I think in a stateless society, this could be handled by a private police force and justice system, but I'd also like to be someone that young people could come and talk to about things they may be too embarassed to talk to their parents about. At this time, I have no plans of having children of my own so it's something I feel I could get behind and really serve my community with. I think the best way to prevent harm to children is for all of us to be involved. Not to be nosy, but to know enough to recognize a legitimate and serious problem when we see one.
--
Jackie Fiest
Jackie, thanks for weighing in. A number of good thoughts to which I'd like to reply, but no time now, plus, I'd like to get a few more responses and a better overview of people's thinking. I did though want to say that while I'm usually the one saying, the market will work it out, I don't think that answer works here. If children are the property of their parents or legal guardians, I don't see how the market will protect those children and if that's the libertarian take, then libertarians would have to conclude that interfering with how parents treat their children is a form of invasion. Even if a child asked you for help, in that situation, interceding on the child's behalf would be considered aggression on your part. If children are not their parent's property, though, yet are too young to care for themselves, who is their ultimate guardians? In our ideal world, obviously not the state. But who? I think this is a tricky problem.
Just about every libertarian I have read on or heard speak, I believe, would tell you that liberty is having the ability to live your life as one sees fit...as long as you aren't harming anyone else. When a parent is abusive to their children, clearly they are harming them, thus action would be warranted. I think we could also have a discussion for days about if children are "owned" by their parents. I would suggest that parents posses children, but down own them. If we say someone can own another person, any person, it would take us back to a place in history that leaves too many people exposed to harm.
I'm inclined to agree with that Jackie, but you see the problem it creates. Who then has the authority to intervene in the adult-child relationship? And who gets to make the judgment about what crosses the line between strict parenting and abuse? One persons "protecting a child" could be another persons "invasion and aggression."
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Tough questions. Just a point of clarification. I assume you mean parent/guardian-child relationship as opposed to adult-child. I know this sounds collectivist but it really comes down to community standards. Before everyone jumps all over me, look at it this way. Everyone would accept me saying that the market would handle it. But the market is just a metaphor for the people or people. If most people in a geographical area think spanking is not abuse and you do, your intercession will be viewed as aggression by them. I know this sounds like a copout, but each person is going to have to decide for themselves when it is appropriate to intervene, in a legal manner, in another's family's business. They still have the option of social sanctions.
Parents are basically prison wardens. And I don't mean to imply, like some anarchists do, that parents are some kind of illegitimate authority like the State. I think most parents are good people and you should listen to and respect them. There are people who are great at parenting, some who are lousy and the rest are middle of the road but trying to do their best.
As soon as a child feels that they can provide for themselves, they should be able to leave. Until that time, the parents rule the roost. Of course, there are limitations. Which gets us back to the original question. What are those limitations?
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it
Learned Hand
In the past men created witches: now they create mental patients.
Thomas Szasz
Relinquish liberty for the purposes of defense in an emergency?
Why? It would seem that in an emergency, of all times, one needs
his greatest strength. So if liberty is strength and slavery is weakness,
liberty is a necessity rather than a luxury, and we can ill afford
to be without it—least of all during an emergency.
F.A. Harper
Jackie, my problem with that explanation is that we could well end up in a situation where a market niche develops for courts-protection agencies that cater precisely to child abusers. They provide the parents all the usual protections against agression but offer rules that provide especially strong protection against intervention in the parent-child relationship and yet gives the parent free reign to abuse their child, use her for prostitution, say, or physcially abuse him. Then you end up in a situation where anyone who wants to intervene on the child's behalf is now up against a count-protection agency conceived and hired precisely to protect the parent's abuse. Like I said before, while most things will be worked out in the market, a priori reasoning suggests that some things can't be. Just repeating the mantra of market purity solves nothing and certainly doesn't win any supporters to the cause of liberty.
LS: Nice to hear from you again. I know we haven't always agreed, but I do enjoy hearing your thoughts. In this case, I think there's a great deal of good sense in what you say. And your approach is certainly consistent with a customary law approach, which I assume would have the sympathy of most libertarians. So, yes, there's certainly something to think over there.
I wanted, though, to offer yet another possibility that only just occurred to me today. (It's funny how once you put this sort of thing out into the world, your own thought processes seem somehow to change or accelerate or something) I don’t know how well it will fly, but I do think it has promise. If libertarianism is rooted in natural law and if natural law is based in our evolutionary socio-biology – I know I won’t get universal consent on that, some base it in a creator – then we have the fascinating argument that humans, as reflected in our historical and social behaviour, feel a stronger commitment to immediate family members who share our genetic material. The more another person shares our genetic material the more we are likely to make sacrifices to help that person. There’s a large literature on this topic. Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene is the pioneering work, but anyone interested in an overview of evolutionary biology from a mostly-libertarian perspective might want to check out Paul Rubin’s, Darwinian Politics.
Anyway, if that’s true, then might there be an argument that we have an invested ownership in our genetic destiny, including a concern for the thriving of our sibling’s, children’s or parent’s offspring? Obviously, once the children are of age to make their own decisions, all such ownership claims are severed, but as long as they remain dependent on adult care we have an ownership interest in ensuring they survive and thrive. If so, then that would give a natural law basis for, say, intervening in an abusive situation visited upon our nephews or nieces by our own siblings or their spouses.
I realize this is a very narrow crack of opportunity and (as I’m sure some will point out to me) not without its problems. However, I do think it might be something to build on in libertarian theory. Your thoughts are appreciated.
B.C.'ing you.
Copernicus
Copernicus,
In this whole debate about free market justice, judging by your analysis, it would seem you've forgotten the "free market" aspect when making your judgement.
You're worried about police and/or arbitors making rules that make it near to impossible to stop child abuse in the name of protecting the parents. Okay, let's say, for the sake of arguement, that's exactly what has happened. How many responsible, mature adults are going to continue to pay into a system that protects criminals? If this were to happen, people will notice and if they don't like it, they can bring in an entirely new police force, and put the old one out of a job. If a police force isn't doing it's job, and I'd argue protecting children from an abusive adult ranks right up there as far as jobs society expects a police officer to do, would you continue to pay into it?
Yes, there are people out there who are sick, and do beat their sons and rape their daughters, but I'd suggest that the majority of people are not that way. And, unfortunately there is no means of justice that is going to get it right 100% of the time. However, in a society where the law and justice are directly accountable to the people, and who are aware that another police force would be all to happy to step in take their place, I'd suggest there will be a great deal more efficency than the current system we have now where the people have very little to no say at all.
I'd look at the level of harm to the child. For example, if a child runs crying to the authorities that he/she did something and was punished via a spanking, and the child is found to simply have a small red spot on their bottom, no intervention. Possibly even some sort of repremand to the child. However, if the child is found to have severe bruising and/or any other kind of damage, then intervene.Even those who may not agree with spanking at all, I feel, would have to agree that there is a huge difference between a small red spot and massive bruising. One is clearly worse than the other, by any standards.
Again, I feel the market would figure it out, and a private police/justice system could handle it.
Copernicus,
I am going to give what you said some thought. In the meantime, would you remind me on what issues we disagree? I honestly forgot. Thanks.
Jackie, it’s not that I don’t understand those arguments; it’s that I don’t find them persuasive. Markets are superb for allocating resources but useless for resolving value conflicts. Markets only work where the rules of practice are agreed upon by the participants. You’ll never resolve a Prisoners-style Dilemma with market forces. To use the language of game theory, market solutions will always privilege Nash Equilibria over Pareto Optimality and consequently in a Prisoners Dilemma all players suffer. The problem here is a values problem, rooted in the ontological status of children – and by extension, those who would act as their advocates against their parents. Markets are good at serving individual value preferences; they offer no solution to value conflicts. The story you tell may well work out just fine in highly homogenized, relatively isolated areas, say in intentional communities. Most human beings though live in densely populated urban areas where no such commonality of values can be assumed.
In that context, the markets job will be to create services for the diverse range of law regime preferences. There will be a rich patchwork of courts-protection agencies and, as I was speculating, some will emerge that cater to child abusers. This will be a niche in the market. In a large city, the fact that most people will not hire the service of such an agency does not mean that they won’t have plenty enough business. Of course there will be costs, as Hoppe and Block constantly say, to doing business with an isolated or ostracized court-agency, but that doesn’t mean that child abusers won’t be happy to accept those costs to have the legal patina and defence of force to continue in their higher preference of harming a child.
Furthermore, if my agency says, quite understandably, that it will not protect my right to interfere in other’s family life, but the child abusers agency explicitly defines a parent’s child as his or her own property, in the full and classical sense of that word, I can only intervene for that child knowing that my agency will not protect me and I’ll be at the mercy of an abuser-friendly court-agency. This is a very different situation from a boundary dispute or violation of contract. It is not the allocation, but the definition, of property that is contested. As I said, the market is not a panacea and it won’t solve this problem without agreement among market actors upon the ontological status of dependent children. Markets can only produce positive-sum outcomes if the actors agree upon the rules of the game. This is a problem that needs to be resolved through either empirical legal tradition, as LS suggested, or a priori natural law theory. (Or, both?)
LS: I'm shocked, shocked, I say. You've already forgot our great Gabby Kolko and Tommy Sowell debate? To be honest, I was maybe exaggerating my objection to Kolko a bit for our mutual entertainment. I was, though, sincere about finding Sowell's Knowledge and Decision a work of great insight that certainly played a big role in moving me to a deeper understanding of the function of knowledge in markets. But let's not get back into that. I think we exhausted it.
Sorry to necropost an old thread, but I found this today on LewRockwell.com and wanted to share. It talks about "Friedman" anarchy versus "Rothbardian" anarchy and how the preferred would handle the situation of child abuse. It asks a lot of the same qustions posted here and gives answers far superior to anything I posted here.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block167.html
Awesome, Jackie.
Rothbard covered a lot of this. In my view, if one believes that people who comprise the "majority" can vote for a government to protect kids, then there's no reason those same people can't voluntarily create agreements wherein they will have a private child protection/arbitration service that does the job and is more connected to what the society wants, rather than what politicians want. One of the major problems with government/state systems is that they have no way to attenuate properly in order to fit consumer needs, whereas the market, of course, has every incentive to do so! :-)
Gotta fly!
Awesome, Jackie.
Rothbard covered a lot of this. In my view, if one believes that people who comprise the "majority" can vote for a government to protect kids, then there's no reason those same people can't voluntarily create agreements wherein they will have a private child protection/arbitration service that does the job and is more connected to what the society wants, rather than what politicians want.
The same goes for charity, medical care, and other welfare. Using this argument will usually flush out the advocate's view of human beings in general, and Americans in particular. If they disagree, then what they really are saying is that people are inherently bad and have to be forced to do the right thing. This will reveal them to be the same as their supposed nemeses: conservatives. If they agree, they might be on their way to becoming a libertarian.
That's what I was thinking.
I was talking to a friend during a video game conference abotu this and he was like, "Well the thing about Austrian economics is it doesn't take into account that there is preditory pricing in somethings." ...and I thought...so the reason why we need government is we need to force people to pay taxes because people are bad and won't give voluntarily? So, if people are inherently bad, why does the government tax people who donate over 10% of their income to prevent them from doing so? And if people are inherently bad, thus a need for government, and the government is just a group of people, doesn't that put a group of inherently bad people in charge of the masses?
"If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one."
I forget who said it.
Jackie: Well, I guess necro-posting is going around. I had a specific reason to review this discussion and hadn’t anticipated seeing any updates to it. I do appreciate your further contributions. I have done considerable further research on this topic, looking at a host of other arguments. Among the sources I’ve looked at is the one to which you’ve linked. However, I didn’t find it all that useful, mostly because Fleischer gets too sidetracked on extraneous issues, such as the definition of abuse. I acknowledge there’s a place for such a discussion, but I was asking a more fundamental question: what recourse exists in the case where everyone involved agrees the child is being abused – even the abuser. Block has nothing to say on this matter which I found useful.
Gard, I have to admit being a little disappointed by your intervention into this discussion. How on earth is any protection agency going to undertake the protection of dependent children? The children by definition are not capable of providing demand for such a service. Are the parents to do so? Parents who do not abuse their children would have no reason to do so and those that do would have a positive incentive to not do so. This makes no sense to me. Frankly, I have the impression you never even read my posts in this thread. I think I demonstrated pretty clearly this is a problem that cannot be solved by the market. For all its virtues, the market is not god, not a panacea to all human ills. The facts are that dependent children must be considered the property of their parents or anybody could simply take anyone’s children from them any time they chose without it constituting a crime. Yet, if dependent children are the property of their parents then anyone’s interference with the use of such property on the basis of mere personal values or subjective preferences is a violation of the non-aggression principle. There’s no way around this. Rothbard’s attempt in Ethics of Liberty to prescribe a stewardship model leads him to the absurd position that parents cannot torture their children, though they can starve them to death. I guess deliberate and systematic starvation didn’t qualify as torture for Murray.
After all my research, I still believe that my solution above, rooted in an evolutionary-based approach to natural law is the only – however imperfect – resolution of the problem. I’m just finishing up a treatise on Voluntary Governance in which I treat this issue. Look for it in all quality bookstores. (Or, maybe, just on my web site.)
B.C.’ing you.
I'm sure I've said the following somewhere before.
In a stateless society, I think that a sort of a cultural equilibrium will be reached. It may vary from region to region. If a overwhelming majority of a community think that a particular action or mode of parenting is abusive, they will "rescue" the child. If not, the minority still has the backup of social ostracism. If that minority can convince more people, then the cultural ball will be moved in their direction.
I agree with Copernicus that the market is not a panacea. And I think it is a bit of a cop out when libertarians just say "the market will take care of it". We libertarians are up front when we say that we don't know exactly what a free society would look like but that doesn't mean we can't offer a framework or general outline on how things would work. We have many, though a quickly decreasing number of examples how severly hampered markets handle things now.
While it sounds crude and unlibertarian, in the end things really come down to supermajority rule, community standards, etc. If 90%+ of a given population thinks something is wrong, they will act. The virtue of a free society is that any actions undertaken will be on them. They won't get legitimacy from the State apparatus. They have to take upon themselves the cost and the risk. I think that this fact alone will prevent any large population of people taking egregious actions towards a minority.
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