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What rules are those that you physically punish him for?
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Does he know these rules and the consequences?
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What is his reaction when this occurs?
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How often does this occur?
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When it occurs, what brought him to act in the way he did?
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What age did you start with this?
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If you had a daughter instead, would you treat her the same way?
No, no, you have it all wrong.
A right is a legal claim.
To make a legal claim, one must be able to reason and to communicate.
There is no evidence that young children can reason.
Therefore, they have no rights.
I do know that there are rules about non-violence and property rights.
But there is no rule, applicable to adults, in an anarchist state that says “you can not eat all that chocolate you got for Christmas in one sitting because it will make you sick” or “You can not use a deep fat fryer” or “you must wear your inflatable armbands when playing round the pool” , or “you can not play with those sharp knives” etc. There would appear to be rules that apply to children that do not apply to adults.
Having read that section from “The Ethics of Liberty” it seems that Rothbard thinks that the “childrens” rules cease the moment the child leaves home, regardless of age.
Rothbard: But when are we to say that this parental trustee jurisdiction over children shall come to an end? Surely any particular age (21,18, or whatever) can only be completely arbitrary. The clue to the solution of this thorny question lies in the parental property rights in their home. For the child has his full rights of self-ownership when he demonstrates that he has them in nature—in short, when he leaves or “runs away” from home. Regardless of his age, we must grant to every child the absolute right to runaway and to find new foster parents who will voluntarily adopt him, or to try to exist on his own. Parents may try to persuade the runaway child to return, but it is totally impermissible enslavement and an aggression upon his right of self-ownership for them to use force to compel him to return. The absolute right to run away is the child’s ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership, regardless of age.
So what do you do if your three year old child runs away from your front garden towards a main road… its clearly leaving home of its own volition (praxeology tells us that), presumably the anarchist can now no longer use any physical force to stop the child running in to the road, but must now run alongside the child using their best arguments to convince the child not to run across the road. You have 1.7 seconds to make your case… a car is speeding round the corner… tempted to grab you child (use force)?
If you answer involves an argument “well the kid’s not really leaving home, he’s just going temporarily” them my question is “how do you know?”. There is not enough time (between now and a possible impact of the car and your child) to even ask the question.
What would you do if it was an adult?
If you want one specific question then its “what metric do you use for determining the degree to which your child obeys your rules?”, but the question is of course irrelevant if you dispute the premises I make leading up to that one question.
Do you mean to what degree the kid is obeying the rules or to what degree should they be obeying the rules?
What evidence do you require to prove that children can reason?
Did the child really want to run away? You think a 3 year old could make that decision?
You use the same force you would to defend any of your other property.
What evidence would you require to show that a child can choose to have sex? And please don’t come back with the “I asked you first bullshit”, because I am just trying to clarify what you are asking.
It would depend rather critically on my A) estimation of the probability of a collision, B) my estimate of intentions of the adult (from his facial expression, demeanour, anything he may be saying or shouting etc). Under some circumstances I would certainly intervene by force (maybe I could grab the guy’s belt).
So why not use that exact same procedure on a child?
Fine. Let me ask this: What evidence are there that prove that adults can reason?
Personally I think not. But I’m not a fan of praxeology. If I’m a praxeologist (is that a word?) then I can only assume the child is currently wanting to leave home.
Absolutely not. And I believe the degree to which he cam make that decision increases with age.
Not true. If you come to my house I may impose such a rule or ask you to leave. [:)]
Rules exist everywhere, and as a guardian of a child those children can choose to follow your or pay the consequences or leave. But since Spidey wants to expound his theory here again after we’ve already had probably half a dozen posts about it I’ll digress. Thanks for your time Mick.
I somehow doubt that.
I would assume the child cannot reason yet and as such, has chosen no such thing.
Either the child can choose to leave, or the child cannot choose to leave. There are only the two options. There is no “degree” to making the decision.
That would be too risky. With an adult I would give a lot of “benefit of the doubt”, i.e. I’d say to myself “he’s an adult, he probably knows what he’s doing… he’s probably running for some very important reason, he’s cutting it fine, but has probably assessed the risks”… whereas with a kid I’d say to myself “its only a kid, kids do stupid things, he may not have even noticed the speeding car”, even if I thought the chance of impact was small I would still grab the kid by force. My perceived risk threshold for taking the use-force option would and should be far lower for a child (any child, mine or otherwise).
You are just asking the same question. What are you trying to prove with this line of questioning?
Nothing of what Spidey is talking about has anything to do with Praxeology. And praxeology is not somethign your simply a fan of, it’s just simply a fact of reality. It’s like not being a fan of gravity. Well i’m not particularly a fan of gravity either, I’d love to just fly around! [Y]