Here's a tough one: probable child sex

Economics Political Theory
21

There is competition - extended family. If the parents don’t do the job, then the grandparents will. And if they won’t do it, then the aunts or uncles will. And if they won’t do it, only then should we start talking about genetic strangers. Genetic strangers raising children is dangerous enough and when you set up a system where genetic strangers are the children’s last resort with no further recourse (foster parenting), you get systematic child abuse.

I don’t agree with Rothbard that running away is sufficient to prove the child’s independence from its parents. I think it depends on the customary law context - that might be the test whereby the law determines that a child is fit to stand for himself at law, or it might be something else. The root issue is that until such time as a child can stand for his own rights and speak for himself at law, someone must do it in his stead. Deciding who is permitted to do this is not just a matter of cracking open the phone book to a random page and picking a random name. It is undeniable that parents have their children’s interest at heart more than genetic strangers do. The law must take this fact into account.

Clayton -

22

This seems to make more sense than the running away standard. However, running away is certainly a signal that something is wrong at home. Rothbard is not entirely off the mark.

23

That’s fine, but do you take this approach with other issues?

Many of them, yes.

Do you not care about restrictions on liberty as long as it’s not on you or your kids or your friends?

Depends on the context, of coarse. As a practical matter, laws are generally binding on everyone. In a philosophocal sense, yes I only care for myself, and some of my family and friends (voluntary community might be included in the term friends)

I find that quote rediculous, by the way. If I have an enemy, in the true sense of the word, whom I would want to see dead and presumably, who would want to see me dead, there’s no way I would care if he’s oppressed. I know it’s supposed to evoke some kind of lofty altruism or ideolgical steadfastness, but it’s nonsense.

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I agree he’s not entirely off the mark but I doubt that customary law will take this as its sole criterion and the larger point is that his methodology is flawed. He deigns to “deduce” the rules of law regarding when a child has standing at law but, at root, his arguments are arbitrary.

Anyone who’s been a parent knows that there is an ineradicable element of coercion to the parenting process. And it’s only unhealthy when parents use physical violence in ways that the healthy human child’s brain is not adapted to receive. For example, we see in nature that a dog will nip its pup’s ear to teach it a lesson, and so on*. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the pup then goes on to become emotionally scarred for the rest of its life. It appears that a pup’s brain is adapted to receive and respond to an occasional nip on the ear and to be the better off for it (learned a lesson that might have been much more costly to learn in the School of Hard Knocks). I’m not going to wade into the quagmire of parental discipline but I think that pretty much everywhere, at all times in history except the modern West in the last few decades, a small amount of non-vicious physical discipline has always been a part of human parenting.

The Molyneux theory attempts to say this is why we have a State (groan). I find this absurd and I find it impossible to believe that basically every human being that has ever lived on the face of the Earth has been emotionally traumatized by the very moderate level of physical discipline administered by parents throughout the ages. Perhaps an argument could be made that the sedentariness of human life after the Agricultural Revolution has intensified the level of physical discipline that parents administered. It’s definitely a subject that’s worth researching because there is so much bullshit flying around about it.

But the “anarcho-capitalist child mill society” envisioned by some people is not only grotesque but, I believe, probably indicative of that individual’s own emotional issues regarding childhood. People who have been victimized by child abuse are the worst people to consult in the public policy debate precisely because they are outliers. Yet we treat people who were abused as children and now decide to “stand up for children” like they’re cancer survivors who decide to become cancer-research spokespersons. It’s not analogous. Most child abuse is the result of our grotesque system of step-parenting. As a rule, genetic parents simply do not sexually abuse or kill their children. When you look to the tiny minority of those who have been abused in shaping public policy, you end up with policy tailored to the exception, not the rule. Every parent becomes an incestuous child rapist in the eyes of the law until proven not guilty and the natural first line of defense (genetic parents) is systematically destroyed.

Clayton -

*Another human example that most people don’t think about is getting a newborn to get suction on its mother’s breast for the first time after childbirth. While the infant is born with the capacity to suckle, it still has to get the “feel” of it before it really catches on and in the mean time, it can go hungry (which can be dangerous) while it keeps breaking contact and not getting suction. So basically what the mother should do is to intentionally smother the baby against her breast for a second or two. In the process, the baby has a natural reflex to try to get air by sucking in. Mission accomplished, you have solid contact on the nipple and then the mother lets the baby have room to breathe through the nose.

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@Clayton

Regarding physical discipline, my parents did not physically discipline either me or my sister after the age of 6. It may be acceptable while kids are still young and still do not really understand what’s going on, but it’s not something that I think should continue past a young age, and certainly not once puberty starts. And to be honest, it seems like parents spank their children more out of frustration than discipline. Maybe it’s not the case, but from it certainly seems that way from the way I hear parents talk about what it was like raising kids (not my parents, as they basically didn’t spank either me or my sister).

26

That may very well be true. The point I’m trying to make is that a certain amount of coercion that would not be acceptable between adult peers is ineradicable in the parent-child relationship (or any guardian for that matter). I doubt that our ancestors on the African Savanna 20,000 years ago spanked their children. there has probably been some intensification in physical discipline vis-a-vis the environment we evolved in. That said, parents obviously didn’t abide by libertarian law with respect to their children and probably occasionally smacked their children or grabbed them by the ear or whatever. My hypothesis is that the human child is well-adapted for the very low-level parental “violence” that existed in that environment in a manner directly analogous to the dog nipping one of her pups’ ears.

Clayton -

27

@acft

nothing wrong with caring only for yourself and close ones. I suppose I did mean care in a slightly different manner than its general usage.

As far as the quote goes: I don’t think you understand what he meant. Or maybe you do, but you don’t see the value in “loving your enemy” the way I do, which is fine. However, the point is made by a quote by a German pastor who was anti-Communist during the rise of Hitler, only to learn the error he made:

“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no oneleft to speak out for me.” -Martin Niemöller

When you don’t care about anyone’s freedom (but yours and your family’s/friends’) you fall into this trap. No different than a police officer or someother bureaucrat that thinks they are on the same side as TPTB, and don’t mind restricting your freedoms, only to find out in the end that TPTB don’t care for them and will take their freedom too.

Of course, to each his own. I believe liberty is most secure when in the maximum number of hands. Just my opinion, though.

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{There is competition - extended family. If the parents don’t do the job, then the grandparents will. And if they won’t do it, then the aunts or uncles will. And if they won’t do it, only then should we start talking about genetic strangers. Genetic strangers raising children is dangerous enough and when you set up a system where genetic strangers are the children’s last resort with no further recourse (foster parenting), you get systematic child abuse.}

Parents are predisposed towards caring for their kids, but that does not mean everyone else is a dangerous threat to them. However, it is relevant to ask, why expect some people to care about other people’s kids?

For the retirement package, of course. I think this is what will eventually replace the traditional family structure; children and adults who contract through a third party, whereby the adult agrees to pay for the child’s education and the child agrees to pay for the adult’s pension. Both the children and adults will assert their interests through the third party agencies, which will have standardized contracts regarding the shared use of property and mutual obligations. If you read any workplace management guide, it is obvious why families tend to fight a lot; because of the communist arrangements regarding property and ambiguous obligations.

Once children become autonomous, mobile units, the silent problem of sexual abuse could potentially be eradicated. The fact that there is a silent problem in the first place, reveals a severe lack of confidence in many young people in the era of welfare schools and infantilization. Once a child runs away from home, they no longer face the circumstances that contributed to their prior silence. That means sexual abusers will be in deep shit.

I would place as much faith in a caregiver-rating agency as I would in a credit-rating agency. There is no real competition if the child doesn’t get to choose who their caregiver is. A few kids will make poor choices, so naturally agencies would conduct probationary periods. The greater the competition, the more opportunities children have to go to a better home.

But won’t children be indentured servants under these circumstances?

Surely that’s better than being indentured bums. The agencies would advertise their services to kids beforehand, including their quality-rating from some independent party. This is essentially what formed the competition between wagon trains in the not so wild west, and is similar to how private prisons would compete for prisoners in an anarcho-capitalist society. As consumers, kids would push for maximum exit strategies, while as suppliers, agencies would push for minimum tolerance of kids who bail out of contracts without a valid reason. There’s a great deal more to explain, but enthusiasts of the free market are already well-versed in explaining away the details of theories like this, because they understand the basic incentives of social reciprocity.

29

{Anyone who’s been a parent knows that there is an ineradicable element of coercion to the parenting process. And it’s only unhealthy when parents use physical violence in ways that the healthy human child’s brain is not adapted to receive. For example, we see in nature that a dog will nip its pup’s ear to teach it a lesson, and so on*. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the pup then goes on to become emotionally scarred for the rest of its life..

The Molyneux theory attempts to say this is why we have a State (groan). I find this absurd and I find it impossible to believe that basically every human being that has ever lived on the face of the Earth has been emotionally traumatized by the very moderate level of physical discipline administered by parents throughout the ages..

People who have been victimized by child abuse are the worst people to consult in the public policy debate precisely because they are outliers. Yet we treat people who were abused as children and now decide to “stand up for children” like they’re cancer survivors who decide to become cancer-research spokespersons.}

I agree entirely with this.

30

I always start from certain assumptions.

First, the only action is a tort action. If you don’t have an aggrieved party and a causal chain to connect to one or more originating actors you don’t have a claim to make.

The second thing, is that if an “actor” can’t stand before the court directly, they need a responsible proxy who will stand in as responsible on their behalf. I believe there are two forms to this, 1. is to assume responsibility for the actions of the aggrieved party, the second form is not to assume responsibility but to advocate on their behalf, and in fact, this is what we see in lawyers.

In the case of animals, they cannot act to provide for their own defense. While someone may advocate for them, we use the “owner” as the responsible party. If I were to abdicate ownership, I would be placing the animal back into the pool of unowned “things” in this world, and the animal would stand naked before his accuser.

With children we have a special case, the expectation is that the child will at some point be able to act in his own defense, and will stand naked before the law (in otherwords no one can assume responsibility for his actions.) At what point does that occur?

Anyway, with the sex issue, I think one way of looking at it is to realize that when the child becomes an adult, there’s no reason that the adult couldn’t seek some form of tort against any adults who had engaged in sexual activity with him or her as a child. An adult could advocate for the child, while he or she is still a child. Why not have the equivalent of ambulance chasers, who would look for abused children to advocate for? Or the equivalent of rescue operations?

I don’t know that there are “right” answers. The solutions implemented in society will flow out of our social norms. And they will be altered and pressured based on the feedback loops our norms and laws create.

There are a lot of dissonant feedback loops in the ways we approach and handle these situations in the US currently. I would suggest it is a failure of imagination on our part to look at issues as deprave as the inclusion of children in adult sex acts and assume that property rights laws, tort actions, and the use of non-coercive behaviors can’t create sufficient feedback to minimize these types of behaviors.

There is no “perfect” solution. One of my basic assumptions is that the acceptable behaviors within a society flow from the mores, norms, and laws of that society. These acceptable behaviors result in a society that has a certain level of wealth, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, etc. Those factors result in a fitness vector that sets a baseline for the members of the society such that they are able to act in ways that help them survive, primarily, and thrive, secondarily. In other words, the societies with “better” social norms, will thrive better.

Back to the child sex issue. Without making all kinds of arguments for or against different behaviors and scenarios, I would guess that if you take two socieities, one with looser social mores and norms about the sexual activity of children, and one with tighter mores, that time would demonstrate the positive and negative affects on each society. However, the complex way in which we form and justify our differring criteria for these norms, is probably so complex, that one can’t simply look at which society seems wealthier to get a clear understanding. This is where human action and systems theory come in. Look at the way in which the norms create feedback loops in the society.

In the US, sex crimes law is cast so wide, that the sex offender label is being applied at an overwhelming rate, and is effectively meaningless, too many have it for it to be useful, and all are treated as if they were the worst possible type of criminal (sexually violent predators), when very few (1% or less) are actually of that type. These are the rapists and/or murderers (of adults and/or children) who have no conscience and who will repeat their behaviors over and over unless prevented. At this point the label becomes meaningless, and in the near future more than 1% of the population will be labeled as such. At what point, 2%, 5%, 10%, will we realize that the treatment of these fathers, sons, husbands has become so terrible and aggregious that we are victimizing our own population in the same way that only the worst of sex offenders has ever done.

How does a society effectively let children learn about healthy sexuality without them experimenting and exploring through their own natural curiosity? Why do we criminalize that behavior instead of dealing with it with tort/counselling/education? Why don’t we handle the majority of adult actions in this way also? How many of our adult men and women have grown up with unhealthy or distorted understandings of their own sexuality? What does it mean to have a healthy sexuality?

I’ve seen first hand the devastation that happens to families and children when this type of situation happens to a father in a custody situation, and I’ve seen it narrowly avoided by a mother in the same situation. I’ve seen the behaviors the state engages in that are absolutely horrendous. I’ve seen what happens when the legal system and social services step into a relatives home because of sexual activity between minor step-siblings. It’s devastating, absolutely devastating. I’ve seen police called to a school because a boy punched a girl in her butt.

So, what’s the answer? It’s not easy, but please tell me that tort and private property provided by private jurisprudence can do a better job. The state is out of control.

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I think that it is an unjustified assumption that child abuse is common enough to fuel such an industry. If you look at history, child abuse was handled - like other thorny family issues, such as divorce - primarily through religious institutions and this is the case in more than one culture (I don’t know if it’s a plurality or not, but Judaism, Islam and the various sects of Christianity all have this trait in common).

I think the modern view that this is the result of some kind of “backwardness” on the part of our ancestors is the height of hubris and an example of the presentist fallacy. Anyone who has been put through the family law grist mill understands that the issues are simply too complex for law-as-such and really require more of a “soft touch”, that is, one-on-one mediation with someone who specializes in family disputes.

Law is more oriented around crimes and torts, neither of which are applicable to most family disputes and - when they are - can be brought to law on those merits. In other words, if a husband beats his wife, that’s assault and can be brought to law on that grounds as a separate matter from the divorce which can still be handled through less formal channels. Modern family law in the US rolls the whole thing into one big tarball and what ends up happening is we have created an “abuse-industrial-complex” where women can materailly profit from making false claims of abuse in the early part of a divorce proceeding in order to gain tactical advantage (under the VAWA and State-copycat rules, those false claims cannot come back to bite her later on, legally, so she has no incentive not to lie). And in the meantime, families are being shredded by the legal system. Mostly poor families, of course. But our system is far more enlightened.

Clayton -

32

BA-BABA BIRD BIRD BIRD, BIRD IS THE WORD, BA-BABA BIRD BIRD BIRD, BIRD IS THE WORD I’m sorry, I just had to.

33

Clayton,

I always assume that something only survives or thrives in a property/liberty based socio-political ecosystem, if there is in fact a market for such services. So, while I propose it as a potential solution, I don’t presume to know one way or another whether or not there is a market for it. But I hope my example demonstrates in a simplistic way that we can expect entrepreneurial behaviors to imagine and implement a wide variety of solutions, and through such experimentation we will find efficient solutions that do work effectively, but never perfectly.

Secondly, also agreeing with you, you may recall from an earlier conversation my discussion of Nassim Taleb’s argument that the old stuff in our technology and in our knowledge, is more likely to survive than the new stuff, because somehow it has passed through the evolutionary pressures and proved to be sufficiently resilient to survive. Thus, I agree about the religious institution argument. There’s a resilience they have, that indicates specific benefits they confer on societies that warrants a certain level of respect and analysis.

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When you don’t care about anyone’s freedom (but yours and your family’s/friends’) you fall into this trap.

On the contrary, sir, I would have to insist that it is ideologically charged altruism that is a trap. As long as some politician says “its for the good of the children”, someone who was otherwise well meaning will endorse and perhaps engage in behavior they would otherwise refrain from.

No different than a police officer or someother bureaucrat that thinks they are on the same side as TPTB, and don’t mind restricting your freedoms, only to find out in the end that TPTB don’t care for them and will take their freedom too.

HAHA , I don’t think I’ve ever been compared to a cop or beurocrat in my life. First time for everything. Anyway, I don’t see how caring for myself, friends(community), and family= thinking I am on the same side as the powers that be.

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I don’t mean to imply that the one should endorse State-sponsored enforcement of laws that “are to protect children” or that are “for the good of nation” or anything of the sort. I’m saying that if you care for your children or friends and wish to protect them in the kind of voluntarist society that a Libertopia would be, you must be willing to accept that other’s have the right to be free to protect themselves and their children, so long as it doesn’t interfere with your liberty. So while you dont have to do something physically to protect others, it is in your best interest to make sure others have the means to protect themselves and their children. I would not be opposed to, say for example, a county and all of its constituents voluntarily paying fees for some agency that they think will keep them safe as long as i am not forced to participate nor be subject to their “laws.” Maybe we agree more than we realize.

36

I’m saying that if you care for your children or friends and wish to protect them in the kind of voluntarist society that a Libertopia would be

Here is the crux of the issue. We have croseed over from ‘how we live now under the state’ to ‘how we could live in a hypothetical stateless terratory’.

In the original example, the child sex issue was taken from the standpoint of being in a state. Then the OP asked how a libertarian system of law would handle it. Libertarian does not equal anarchist or voluntariist, indeed, many libertarians I know are minarchists.The OP also referenced law. Therefore I assumed the state was still around. Today, here and now, under these real statist conditions I don’t care about child sex. I dont care about the poor kids in china, or india, or texas, or even next door. I don’t know them and I probably wouldn’t like them or their parents if I did and I don’t think any amount of abuse they face would ever justify me being robbed and bullied by police for their benefit.

Furthermore, I have no idea how a given libertarian socity would be, but for for the sake of the example given, lets assume it is peaceful, and is against child abuse.

you must be willing to accept that other’s have the right to be free to protect themselves and their children, so long as it doesn’t interfere with your liberty. So while you dont have to do something physically to protect others, it is in your best interest to make sure others have the means to protect themselves and their children. I would not be opposed to, say for example, a county and all of its constituents voluntarily paying fees for some agency that they think will keep them safe as long as i am not forced to participate nor be subject to their “laws.”

Remember that the OP referenced laws, and laws, as carried out by a state, are not voluntary and they do indeed interfere with my freedom. What you have described here is completely different. Yes, of coarse people can take whatever means they feel are neccesary to protect themselves and their children, and this I never indicated I did not accept. This is a far cry from enforcing arbitray laws on everyone and taxing ME to pay for it. If I have to take the risk of some kid being ‘raped’ or having sex, vs. me getting taxed and policed, I’d say that kid needs to get a derringer and be on his/her way.

If we switch over to ancapistan or voluntaria, my community that I referred to above would include the people living in the voluntary society, so long as their desires for freedoms were clearly laid out in a charter of sorts for reference and agreed to by every member. My community would certainly not, however, include any other enclave or group that did not explicitly agree to live under our set of ‘laws’. And so, given that everyone in my community said “the age of consent is puberty” or something like that its fine. Any activity that takes place below that age would be a violation of the contract for which damages could be sought (not necc. by any central enforcement agency) not because of some abstract morality but because of a person to person written and freely agreed to contract for an acceptable mode of behavior. Furthermore, I would not care about the kids in some other enclave because they don’t fall under our agreement.

If you say we are in a volunteerist, or ancap enclave or community (which I referened in a earlier response) Then yes, because it is a voluntary association of people whose ideology I am more sure of and who are not actively aggressing against me, if there were a clause in an organizing charter outlawing “child sex” however that is defined I would abide by the agreement. However, morally, and from a practical standpoint it simply isn’t my problem if some people abuse their kids.

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@acft

I agree, wholeheartedly. I did seem to overlook the OP saying “law” and thus, implying State. Also, I hadn’t heard of the terms Ancapistan or Voluntaria. I confused them with libertopia. My apologies. As you said, in an Ancapistan, the community voluntarily agrees upon the desire for and right to liberty, and here is where I was meaning to say we must desire to keep liberty secure to all, and of course, here you view the community you live in to be composed of family and friends. Definitely a misunderstanding on my part, sorry about that!

38

@acft

I agree with your point that people only really care about their family and friends. I found out the hard way that that is how the world works. No matter how bad your problems are, they will only get worse until the day you become self-reliant.

This is the exact opposite of how we treat kids. We mollycoddle them for years, until one day we kick them out to get a job. It’s like carrying around an infant everywhere, only to inevitably (and suddenly) drop them. People only pretend to be caring in the political sphere, because they’re spending other people’s money. All they do is perpetuate the cycle of dependency that generates false hope and real despair.

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QFT. See my tag.

40

Okay, I’m fairly new to my researches on libertarian thought, so bear with me and point out anything I get totally wrong…

As far as I can make out, no law ever stopped a person from committing a crime they were physically able to get away with. All sorts of emotional, personal, or moral considerations might stop that person, in other words their free choice-but if they choose NOT to commit the rape of a child, for instance, they aren’t doing it because it’s illegal. They’re doing it because the COST to themselves is greater than the BENEFIT, in their personal opinion.

Cost is measured in many ways, and concerns about possible legal action are by no means the only, or probably not even always the major, considerations. What makes anybody think that having a state-run legal system changes any statistics regarding how many people choose to commit crime?

The original question is about how to prevent crime, which is almost a meaningless concept. Ways to investigate and punish aggression, though, are pretty well developed in the literature.

As far as who has “ownership” of a child, it seems to me that any child old enough to insist upon advocating for themselves must necessarily be allowed to do so. Anything else is aggression. So if the guardian is doing a crummy job of parenting, the child will have to grow up more quickly and seek just action against that person at that time. Running away would be a perfect example of a demonstration that a child is ready to think for themselves. At that point, the parent would have no right to insist that the child return-but the child would of course still have the ability to do so, or to choose a new protector (just like any adult would) and make an arrangement with THEM. Obviously even without a state, there will always be volunteer and privately funded programs that kids can make use of for helping them do this.

This is basically just the way childcare naturally works out, except that in our current system the parents have legal support for violating their childrens’ ability to make decisions until a state-specified age, subject to certain exclusions. They can go force their kid to come home, for example. But if the family dynamic is functional, the child and parent work out basically what amounts to a contract that works to keep peace between them; and if the family dynamic is not functional, unless the law gets involved exactly what I described is what happens. The kid selects someone new to be their guardian, or just leaves home and fends for themselves.

Am I wrong about any of this? I mean, the whole point of liberty-based thinking is that it is founded in the way humans really do things, and does not recognize the need to impose artificial systems. It just gives us a language to define exactly when aggression occurs, so decisions can be made.