Well not really, but it is things like this that at times make me embarassed to call myself a libertarian. The post was prompted by a news story about a woman who killed a social worker that was bringing the woman’s daughter over for a supervised visit.
HENDERSON, Ky. – A nine-month-old boy, his mother and her boyfriend were still missing Wednesday, two days after a social worker was found dead in the mother’s home, and police were taking calls of possible sightings across the Midwest.
Boni Frederick, 67, had taken the boy, who has been in foster care, to his mother’s house for a visit Monday. Police found her body after she failed to return to work, and she appeared to have been beaten to death. Her car also was missing
[snip]
Terrell has a history of abuse charges against children, including charges of assault and endangering the welfare of a minor, police said. The child had been taken from his mother when he was 13 days old because of neglect.
So Sean Lynch responds with this,
I’m not really sure if any level of State ability to take children away from parents is worth it. As soon as you allow the State to decide whether a parent is suited to care for a child, you’ve opened a huge loophole for the majority to oppress minorities, for example by forcing parents to expose their children to State-approved
brainwashinglearning in the governmentindoctrinationcentersschools.
So we are to leave a child with a parent that say is raping that child simply because Sean Lynch is afraid that this could start us down a slippery slope to where children are being indoctrinated in government approved brainwashing centers. Have I got that right?
While I can imagine cases where a child might be better off even with bad State care, my gut feeling is that a child who becomes a ward of the State is more likely to be worse off than better off than if they stayed in their parents. Perhaps a better solution would be to deal with the kinds of problems parents might run into better, for example by legalizing drugs so that parents can deal with their own problems openly without fear of prosecution rather than going to jail. Easier emancipation as suggested by DDF would also help, though obviously not with an infant as in this case.
Okay, I’m open to the argument that things like legalizing drugs might make child abuse issues easier to deal with and less common. However, parents have also done despicable things to their children up to and including killing them. Surely, if we could have known ahead of time the danger that Andrea Yates posed to her children Sean Lynch wouldn’t be out there arguing that they should be left in her care.
Sometimes there are those libertarians that take their arguments so far that they become a complete caricature of the libertarian message. I don’t doubt that Sean Lynch does not condone child rape and would do what he could to protect a child in such a situation, but to write a post like the one linked above is just amazing.
Caveat: I don’t think that all libertarians hold views similar to the one’s expressed by Sean Lynch, but it does seem that some want to take libertarian arguments to extremes at times. Another example of this is the view that there are no such things as public goods, external costs or benefits, or that monopolies even exist (eg, the writtings of Hans Herman-Hoppe).
