I don’t claim anyone has an automatic right to take the children of others. Far from it. My point is this: A parent owns a property right in parenthood. If they cease being a parent, others can claim the property of parenthood of that child. See my earlier post for a fuller explanation. Who will decide if such a claim is justified? The courts. Who runs the courts in a stateless society? For an answer, read the following books; “A Market for Liberty” by Linda and Morris Tannehill, and “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard.
Based on what right will this court decide that the children do not belong to their parents?
Its true that "drugs are bad for people ", what the prohibitions never do is prove why invading people’s homes and locking them in cages is better for them.
If a child old enough to talk says “I want to live with my uncle and not my parents.” What court is going to force him to live with his parents? As I’ve often said, people do not own their children.
Look at it this way… a person may acquire property by homesteading previously unowned property. Take the example of a landowner. A landowner maintains his homesteaded land by acting in a manner consistent with being a landowner (by putting up a fence, or cultivating the land etc.) If he ceases to act as a landowner, he forefits his right to the property, and others have the right to homestead it. In an analgous way, a parent establishes and maintains his homesteaded right to parenthood by being a parent. If he ceases to act in a manner consistent with being a parent, he forfeits his rights to parenthood, and others have the right to homestead it. Note; It’s not the child that’s homesteaded, it’s the parenthood of the child. The child cannot be owned. So if, for example, the original parent put a fence around the child (physically or metaphorically) that by itself is not sufficent to establish parenthood. The fence, metaphorically speaking, must be put around the parenthood, and that’s accomplished by acting like a parent. If you stop being a parent, that’s the equivalent of removing the fence, and then others are free to claim the parenthood.
Now, if a person wrongly homesteaded another person’s right of parenthood, there would be general outrage. They could be sued and punished, probably severely, so nobody would do this lightly. A person wishing to homestead an abandoned parenting claim would probably go to court first to avoid this situation. The court would decide whether the original parent had stopped acting in a manner consistent with being a parent. They would do this based on common sense and societal norms. Undoubtedly, a decision against the original parent would only be reserved for the most serious cases.
If the court were to decided against the original parent, the new homesteader would become the adoptive parent of the child, and have all the rights of parenthood.
If a child can argue in his own name in court then he no longer technically belongs to anyone; he has the ability to assume the full powers and rights of an adult and may choose to live wherever he wishes.
Until that day, the parents do own the child, and the court will have to decide on the basis of different adults’ claim to ownership of the child because the child has not attained the rationality to own himself.
I brought up a similar point when talking about abortion, but your understanding of the matter seems much more mature than mine. Good post.
If a child is abandoned, custody would have to be awarded on a first-come first-service basis, a form of “homesteading”
Its important to understand that human action is not determine by perfect knowledge. If people are generally both libertarian and opposed to child abuse they work for a way to reconcile the two. In the same way that people do not need to understand economies in order to benefit from participating in one, people do not need to be have full understanding of the complexity of human existence in order for free market legal systems to form.
I agree. Also, I have reservations as to whether the parents really own the custody of their child at all. If we have an order in which extended, rather than nuclear, families are the norm, how would it be logically and morally tenable to exclude the rest of the family from custody of the child and give it only to the biological parents?
Parents own their children ???
What does homesteading have to do with human beings ??? Human beings are not property - to claim otherwise is nonsense.
The belief that human beings can be ‘owned’ and so treated as things is also known as slavery, right ?
What’s that supposed to mean ? “property right of being parents to their children.” ? “homestead the property of parenthood” ?
Also, the original question - whether a child should be given drugs at 5 sounds almost like a red-herring to me. I highly doubt that 5-year-olds are interested in ‘drugs’.
Anyway, If the principle of self-government is to be applied consistently then children can do whatever they please as long as they don’t harm others
To believe that children should be ruled for their own good is the same belief that justifies government. After all, government rules its subjects for their own good.
The original question - whether a 5 years old should be allowed to take ‘drugs’ - sounds almost like a red herring to me. I doubt that children that young are interested in drugs at all.
At any rate, if the principle of self-government is to be applied consistently, then children should be free to whatever they please as long as they don’t harm others. .
To believe that parents can rule their children for their own good is the same belief that makes the state possible. Government uses coercion against its subjects for their own good…
The biggest problem with humanity is the forgetting of it’s animal side. Simply observe other species and how they interact with their young and you’ll have the answer. You don’t need economic BS or philosophy to raise the young. It’s built into DNA. The parent will control and guide their young until the child has grown to be able to think like the parent and learned the skills to survive.
As far as drugs go. Maybe everyone should remember why people do drugs in the first place. At least most people. To relieve anxiety and stress. It’s escapism. If society were a better place, people would need less drugs to get away. There will always be the people who use drugs for vision. Most of those people tend to keep their habits in check though.
Also depends what you define as a drug. What about concentrated sugar? What about caffiene? Cold medications? Herbal remedies? Tea? Chili peppers?
Parents do not own their children, and people cannot homestead human beings. You are right about both of those statements.
However, people can and do maintain ownership over rights. They maintain ownership over their own rights, and they can voluntarily consent to allow others to obtain their rights.
Parents do not homestead their children, they homestead their rights which the children as yet cannot exercise, and therefore cannot maintain ownership over. But it is a fact of life that children will grow into adults in several years, and therefore will then be able to take ownership over their rights. So parents do not exactly maintain ownership of their children’s rights. Instead, they maintain a custodial possession of those rights. As such, they are obligated to exercise the rights of their children in a manner that the children themselves would if they were capable of consenting. Parenting is of course more of an art than a science, but to a reasonable degree a parent can predict what their children would choose if the parents keep in mind that the children would make choices in accordance with their own self-interest.
I would disagree with leonidia over the use of the word property. Although parents have created their children, unlike anything else that can be produced by a human being, children are living things which possess rights. I therefore agree with you that the use of the word property is not compatible with parenthood.
How does the parent homestead custodial ownership of the child’s rights? My view is that extended families will edge out the nuclear family in terms of dominance in an anarcho-capitalist order, as it was so until very recently. I believe that the extended family as a whole, and not just the biological parents, would have this custodial right by virtue of their interaction with the child. Would one’s interaction with the child be the criteria for determining homesteading?
Here’s a great article by Kinsella on this:
DW89
"However, people can and do maintain ownership over rights. "
I’m afraid I don’t understand the terminology. I thought that ‘ownership’ and ‘right’ were more or less the same thing. If you own ‘A’ you have the right to do with it whatever you please. If you have a right to use ‘A’ as you see fit, then you own ‘A’
I also thought that homesteading was a principle mostly valid for land and other ‘natural resources’ - a subset of ‘lockean’ property rights ?.
I think the family is an inherently authoritarian institution. (Extended families were less so.) - So the family is part of the problem. It’s not hard to see that tyrannies and ‘paternalistic’ governments are almost the same thing. Our totalitarian western societies treat their subject the way children supposedly must be treated.
A right is a choice that can only be justly made by the individual who maintains ownership over the right. Just because you have a right to something, does not mean that you own it. For instance, people enter into contracts with one another all of the time in which ownership of certain rights are transfered. Just because someone maintains ownership of some of your rights does not mean that they necessarily maintain ownership over you. For example by signing a contract with an employer you are forfeiting some of your rights during a certain context or duration of time. Does that mean that your employer owns you? Of course not. There are very few individual rights that when transferred imply ownership over the individual themselves.
You’re right that homesteading doesn’t apply to this situation, I just couldn’t think of a proper term. I suppose I should have just said that individuals assume a custodial role over a child’s rights.
I don’t think that the family is inherently authoritarian in a negative sense. I think it only becomes so when certain rights that a member of the family are justly owned by that member are discouraged or disparaged by another member of the family. While a parent maintains a custodial ownership over a child’s rights they are in a sense an authority figure, but they are also a caregiver who has justly acquired certain rights, they are not an oppresive force. Governments also need not be authoritarian in an oppressive sense as Bastiat explain in the beginning of “The Law”. However, governments are perhaps inherently institutions that seek to unjustly acquire certain individual rights.
I’d like to clarify some things because there seems to be a lot of confusion here. First, let me define some terms as I use them:
“Property” Anything that can be owned or possessed, whether real property, personal property, intellectual property
“Right” A just claim or title whether legal, prescriptive or moral
“Homesteading” The claiming of previously unowned property, or of property that has been abandoned or vacated.
A biological parent has a just claim or right to be the parent of their child when their child is born. They possess this right. The right is their property. (Not the child. The child is not property). If they stop being a parent, because they neglect the child, they abandon their right to be a parent. Why? Because they are not using their right. They have vacated it. The right, which was their property, is now unowned. Unowned property is free to be homesteaded. A person who homesteads something becomes the new owner. In this case they become the owner or posessor of the right to be the parent.
Of course a parent doesn’t have to neglect a child to abandon their right to be a parent. They can simply give away this right to a person of their choosing or to an agency who will find someone to take over the right. This is the usual method of adoption.
But the problem remains. Parents decide for their children and force their children to accept whatever they [parents] think is ‘good’.
Whether the state or the parents have the ‘right’ to dictate what’s good for children is a misunderstanding of the problem, in my opinion. I think nobody has the right to dictate, or even knows what’s good for others..
As for Bastiat, he says that government is the collective organization of the right to self-defense. Just that. He doesn’t even say that governments are necessary. And almost the whole book is a merciless attack on so called ‘legislators’ and their artificial laws. Perhaps Bastiat was not an anarchist, but he was very close to natural order.
I wonder in part if this confusion perhaps stems from not having read Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty. In it he proceeds to explaining custodial rights and the like, though I think Hoppe has improved on him on this.
As for parenthood being authoritarian, well children are not exactly rational agents. Ought a parent allow them to behave however they please? If they do not abide by the parent’s terms (provided these are reasonable), why should the parent put up with such behaviour? How exactly do you propose, Juan, for a libertarian to deal with children?