How To Rescue a Child (without the State)

Economics Political Theory
1

How might child abuse be handled in a stateless society?

The Scenario

Single-father Bob physically abuses his 3-year old daughter, Jane. (Jane’s mother died while giving birth to her, and there is no extended family.) A nursery nurse becomes suspicious that Bob may be mistreating Jane. She informs the charity Friends-of-Babies, which investigates cases of child abuse, and re-homes abused children. Friends-of-Babies investigate the allegations made by the nurse. They make an assessment, and conclude that Bob is indeed abusing Jane, and that she would be better off if she were removed from that situation, and re-homed with loving foster parents.

A Free Market in Law

Law is the resolution of disputes. What is being disputed here is the ownership right to raise Jane. Bob currently owns this right, and the Friends-of-Babies organization is challenging him for it; they are claiming it for themselves. Assuming Bob objects to the charity’s claim, there is a dispute and the case will go to court. The court will award the right to raise Jane to one disputant or the other.

Free markets produce according to consumer demand. Free market firms strive for excellence in satisfying consumers, and firms that fail to use resources efficiently for this purpose do not survive the competition. This is as true for a free market in the law industry as it is for any other industry. The laws that are produced are those that consumers demand. If free market courts produce laws that are seen as unfair or unjust, they will lose customers. For a free market court, a reputation for honesty, fairness, wisdom and good judgment is essential for continued business.

Friends-of-Babies present their evidence to the court. The court becomes convinced that Bob is an abusive parent. Now they must make their decision. Child abuse, of the kind Bob committed, is widely considered by individuals in society as sufficient justification for intervention; this child needs rescuing. Therefore the court will likely decide in favor of Friends-of-Babies. They would not want to be known as an organization that lets child abuse continue. Following the court decision, Bob must give up Jane to the charity. If he resists, the charity can physically take Jane from him, and Bob has no grounds to complain. Thus Jane is rescued from her abusive father, and is soon found a loving new home.

Some Objections

Now a few objections to this scenario…

  1. What if Friends-of-Babies doesn’t exist? Lots of people feel strongly about protecting children from abuse, and would be willing to donate to such an organization, so we may be confident that such charities will exist.

  2. What if Bob doesn’t agree to go to court? As with any dispute, the alternative to arbitration is a martial contest, which neither disputant wants. If Bob is innocent, he has incentive to go to court to defend himself against the spurious claim. If Bob is guilty, he still has an incentive to go to court, if only because the consequences of not going to court would be worse. With a court decision, the harm that Friends-of-Babies inflicts on Bob is strictly limited, but if Bob refuses to go to court (makes himself an outlaw), the actions taken against him could be much more severe.

  3. How do you define ‘abuse’? That is to be decided by the consumers of laws. There will always be different opinions about what actions justify intervening in the parent-child relationship. The variation will be reflected in the choice of laws offered to consumers, and could vary significantly between cultures. With no monopoly in the law industry, there is no need to search for an ‘objective’ definition, and no need for universal agreement on the definition.

  4. Isn’t this just kidnapping, and aggression against Bob? See note…

  5. Doesn’t this imply parental obligations, and “positive rights”? See note…

Conclusion

I have outlined how child abuse might be handled in a stateless society, with free markets in law and child protection. For all the usual reasons that free markets are better than monopolies, we would expect the laws produced and the protection given to children to be superior with the free market system. Therefore, all other things being equal, children will be safer and child abuse will be far less common without a State.

Note

The last two objections involve libertarian legal theory. My answer is that this court decision may well be consistent with libertarianism. To understand how this could be the case, see Walter Block’s Libertarianism, positive obligations and property abandonment: children’s rights, and Stephan Kinsella’s How We Come to Own Ourselves.

Some questions on Rothbard's parental obligations
The Ultimate Beginner meta-thread
Education and voluntarism
What would you do?
Problems with Self-Ownership
How would you guys respond to this? What articles can help to answer this?
Gathering the good forum posts
Is force acceptable to 'protect' children from abusive homes?
Child protection in a free society?
2

I would recommend a link to something that outlines (in a simple/concise manner) how free market law works. For many, including myself, free market law is the most difficult part of an ancap society to wrap ones head around. In other markets there can be niche markets for people who do not share the same tastes as the norm. For example, most people like packaged food, but a small number of people like organic food. In a free market the organic eaters aren’t forced to eat packaged food because there are small companies that provide for this niche market, probably at a higher cost due to scaling.

In a legal system as you have described though, I would assume that Bob would use a niche firm for providing his law and this niche firm believes in corporal punishment of children. The friends-of-babies likely does not employ the same law firm and the one they employ does not agree with corporal punishment of children.

While Bob may have to pay more for his law (again, due to scaling), he has chosen his firm and it would go against the NAP to force your law on him.

I think what this comes down to is whether or not children are property. If children are property then they do not have rights and Bob can do whatever he wants with or to his child. If children are not property then they are people and have all the same rights as an adult in which case no actor (friends-of-babies) can force the child to do anything it doesn’t agree to.

3

The best description IMO is David Friedman’s chapter Police, Courts, and Laws - on the market in The Machinery of Freedom.

This is answered when Friedman discusses the bargaining process between courts using different law codes, in the above link. Basically, a court enforcing draconian laws (“killing redheads” is the example often used) would not survive the competition in a free market.

As I said, this is libertarian legal theory stuff that I wanted to keep out of scope of this post. But read Walter Block’s paper. The answers lie within.

4

This is not difficult at all. If a parent is initiating force against a kid, then the kid has the right to press charges against the parent. If the kid does not choose to press charges, then no crime has been committed. A kid also has the absolute right to run away and either live on its own or seek other parents. However, it is a violation of the non-aggression axiom for any 3rd party to take a child from its parents against its will.

I should note that I reject the idea of allowing the market to determine the content of the law. I am a Rothbardian, so I believe that the law is absolute and must be universally agreed upon, otherwise a stateless society is unworkable. Any “court” that attempts to enforce a law in conflict with the natural law (the non-aggression axiom) may be forcibly shut down. A minarchist state that enforces the non-aggression axiom must permit competition, but only provided that the competitors enforce the same law (those that don’t are criminal organizations). If a free market in the content of law is permitted (rather than merely the provision of law), it will lead to initiations of force (just as the very existence of a legislature that can invent “laws” leads to initiations of force). Those who support the existence of legislatures or a “free market” in the content of the law are advocates of the initiation of force and therefore also support violating natural rights.

If an action is “widely considered by individuals in society as sufficient justification,” but if the child does not wish to be separated from the parents, then it is a criminal act against both the child and its parents to take that kid away from its family. This is the rationalization used by the social worker creeps and their supporters to justify stealing kids from small religious groups and is something that no supposed “libertarian” should condone.

5

Extended family! Religious organizations! I don’t think there would be an industry of nosy-nannies running around sniffing for child abuse in a natural order society. When has this ever been until modern times under the auspices of the modern Nanny State??

Grandparents, aunts, uncles and other extended family members must stand in line ahead of “compassionate” strangers who would intervene against a parent because seizing custody of children from their genetic relatives can be highly profitable. In other words, the incentives to manufacture evidence of abuse in order to take children away and sell them is huge and genetic strangers, unlike genetic relatives, have no natural reason not to exploit children in this way. Somehow, people are so brainwashed in the modern world that they’ve forgotten that the world is an extremely dangerous place for children whose parents or other genetic relatives are not around to look out for them. The idea of altruistic strangers is largely a myth. Genetic relatives take care of their children because nature has programmed them to do so because it is in the interests of the survival of their genes to do so but genetic strangers lose nothing from the abuse of a child and stand to gain a great deal. Google “Franklin sex scandal.”

Clayton -

Morality vs. legality of child neglect
should the parents of JW's be overruled from life saving blood transfusions for their kids?
6

Also, I think that you have to be careful thinking of law as a “product”. Law, in a natural order society, does not exist except in the minds of people based on what they understand about court case decisions. There is no legislature issuing edicts, there’s just the body of decided court cases. So, the actual product is court decisions, or arbitrated agreements. The body of law simply emerges out of the set of realistically possible arbitrated agreements in the event of a dispute… there are no specific “laws”, per se. You can’t say, “there’s a law against murder” because there is no law against murder, it’s just that if you murder someone, you are almost certainly going to be brought to suit and punished.

So, laws don’t get produced, but law (as an emergent phenomenon) does.

Clayton -

7

Would a non-genetic family member have the right to intervene? For instance, would a step-father who had a very close relationship with his step-son be able to take him away from his abusive alcoholic mother after they (the step-father and the mother) had broken up? Or would say, an uncle who is not related by blood be able to fight for custody over his niece or nephew?

Cheers.

8

I think he should have to wait in line behind other genetic relatives.

Again, he stands in line behind all the genetic relatives. After the genetic relatives, then comes associates and the order of precedence should be according to the amount of economic investment (measured in time, dollars, etc.) which they have made into the child. Some organization that advertises itself as “compassionate” must still stand in line behind a step-parent, godparent or other associate who has actually invested something into the child’s well-being.

This is my view, in any case. The current legal system could hardly be less like what I’m describing.

Clayton -

9

Ok. Since he would have to ‘wait in line’ so to speak, assuming that no other relatives were concerned would the voice of the abusive alcoholic mother come first (after all, she is a genetic relative; the step-father is not)? Also, what if none of the childs genetic relatives or close-associates (like the step father) care? Is it then the duty of psychologists and other official agencies, etc. to intervene?

Sorry for the dumb questions :stuck_out_tongue:

I kind of agree with you in a lot of ways. My only point would be that we don’t necessarily have to wait for anarchy to implement what I believe is a far more ‘natural’ way of solving child abuse. Do you know of any good books on the extended family? I am also interested in sociology as a whole (one of the many areas I am lagging :P)

Cheers.

10

Well, that’s a really tough situation and my inclination is to say that the step-parent should basically be legally powerless. Let’s change the situation just slightly. Instead of an abusive alcoholic mother, you have a naive young single mother who is married by an older pedophile man precisely because she has a young, vulnerable daughter. It’s not that hard to fabricate evidence of alcoholism or substance abuse and take photographs of a bruise the young girl got on her legs when running outdoors. Bada bing bada boom, pedophile man ends up with full custody of a little girl who is essentially his sex slave without any voice in the world to protect her. Permitting genetic strangers to intervene is extremely dangerous and our culture generally does not recognize this. Legally, we tend to take people at face value. The step-father who makes a good show of loving his children is presumed to be a “loving Dad.” The truth might be precisely the opposite and the evidence shows that step-fathers are actually extremely dangerous. The charity organization that puts on a pious facade of “compassion” is taken at face value to be truly desiring to just help kids… but the reality is a lot more sinister. Kids are pimped out of orphanages (Franklin sex scandal) and it is a simple praxeological deduction to realize that pedophiles must be attracted to foster parenting precisely because they get legitimate access to vulnerable kids who have little or no further recourse to protection (the foster parents are the last stop in the State’s child protection system and the State is loathe to believe the accusations of foster children because foster parents are hard to come by and the State has no further alternatives).

Well, definitely we should not wait. Fortunately, a small and growing contingent of psychologists are starting to point out some of the more insane aspects of our current system. I don’t have any book recommendations except the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters which is about evolutionary psychology and briefly discusses this subject (pp. 119-120).

Clayton -

11

Yes, but how many 3-year-olds know they have this right?

Surely you don’t mean that. Your username suggests to me you consider taxation to be a crime, and yet you submit to it and don’t press charges, so how can it be a crime?

As above. While true, this statement is useless for the scenario I presented because a 3-year-old lacks the ability to run away, and lacks the knowledge that he has the right to do so.

Not necessarily. See Block. It could be considered an act of homesteading. By abusing the child, the parents abandon their right to raise the child, so this right becomes homesteadable by any third party.

I was previously a Rothbardian, so I understand where you’re coming from, but this now seems terribly confused to me. The alternative to a free market in law is a monopoly, so you are supporting a monopoly of the content of law, which makes you by definition a statist.

I will ask you the question that led me down the road to abandoning this Rothbardian idea of anarchy operating under the umbrella of a basic legal code: how specific/detailed is this “absolute law” or “basic legal code” that must be “universally agreed upon”? In other words, how much scope for interpretation is there within this umbrella concept of “universally agreed upon” law?

It may not be a criminal act against the parents (see Block). To say that it is a criminal act against the child is to assume that the child has homesteaded his body to the extent that he has a right to decide who raises him. This is not the case for babies.

Do you find it satisfactory that rescuing children from abusive parents is a violation of libertarian law? Isn’t it a bit odd that the consequences of libertarian law are so un-utilitarian in the case of children, when in almost all other circumstances, libertarian laws result in utilitarian consequences? Block shows that rescuing children from abusive parents is not necessarily a violation of libertarian law, hence libertarian laws also result in good consequences where children are involved. To say that rescuing a child from abusive parents is unlibertarian is simply a misunderstanding of libertarianism.

12

I made the supposition that there was no extended family. You can of course substitute “Jane’s grandparents/aunt/uncle” for “the Friends-of-Babies organization” is my analysis.

I did this to demonstrate precisely that the party claiming the right to raise the child need have no link (familial or otherwise) to the child, in order to claim it and possibly be awarded it. So long as the court expects the child to be better off with the other party, they will award that party the right. Presumably, if it is a family member claiming it, the chances of this are higher. The court will have to be extra careful when the new claimant is not a relative, for it would be disasterous for the court’s reputation for it to relocate Jane from one abusive household to another, possibly more abusive one.

How do you explain the millions donated to children’s charities today?

True, and this is why the court will need to be extra careful when the new claimant is not a relative. But not all wannabe foster parents are wannabe abusers.

Yep, that’s exactly the kind of thing we’d expect when we have a monopoly in the law and child protection industries.

13

All true, but I don’t see why I should stop using the term product for what is produced by courts.

14

As free market courts will respond to the consumer demand of the monied interests I can say with 99’99% certainty this.

This will present a lucrative oppurtunity for those with money to bring up gross charges against any parent they deem unfit. The stronger their interests weight the balance, the more likely the court will be to award custody of these kids basically to the highest bidder. Kids will be traded coast to coast from one business owner to his friends as “adoption” when in reality it is just slavery.

“slippery slope” fallacy or not. This is what will happen.

(IOW: if the monied interests deem “red head killing” or other draconian laws in their own interest (say a large amount of worker agitators, ie plebes, are red heads) it will survive. Gvien the history of the wealthy classes and their views towards the common people, I see no reason to think “free market” law would be anything than a return to pre-feudal roman-esque law.)

15

These questions are coming from a statist or central planning mindset. With a monopoly on law, these questions need to be debated and resolved by the politicial philosophers guiding the monopolist, so that the monopolist knows how to make decisions. With a free market in law however, it is perfectly legitimate for me to say “let the market decide”. In other words, these questions are for entrepreneurs to grapple with, not political philosophers. In fact, “let the market decide” is the only answer that a libertarian anarchist qua libertarian anarchist can give.

Clayton, your answers to ESF’s questions are reasonable, but you should make it clear that you are speaking not as a libertarian anarchist when you answer them, but as a legal entrepreneur and/or evolutionary psychologist. It is an example of the trap that many libertarian anarchists fall into. Like when a statist asks (innocently) something like “with a free market in roads, will there be toll booths at every street corner?”. The libertarian anarchist must answer this with “That is for entrepreneurs to decide, but here is one way I can imagine entrepreneurs could charge for road use…”. To not make it clear that answering the question takes us out of the realm of political philosophy is to do a disservice to the libertarian anarchism… the statist may reject your entrepreneurial ideas as unworkable, and in doing so believe wrongly that it follows that libertarian anarchy itself is unworkable. Throwing the baby out with the bath water, as it were. It could easily be the case that your entrepreneurial ideas ARE unworkable, but that only means that YOU would fail if YOU were setting yourself up as an entrepreneur in a free market; it doesn’t mean that free markets themselves are unworkable. As it happens though, in my opinion your ideas sound very reasonable from the entrepreneurial point-of-view, and well supported by the field of evolutionary psychology.

So ESF, remember that Clayton, when he talks about his ideas about who should have precedence to raise a child, is speaking as a potential legal entrepreneur, not saying “this is how things will be under libertarian anarchy”. If you disagree with him on these particulars, it does not invalidate either libertarianism or anarchism.

16

Yes I knew this but ‘let the market decide’ isn’t exactly an answer that fully addresses my question. I don’t like answers that are too mechanical and systematic. I am actually looking for the answer that allows for a margin for error, not an answer which seems to aim for complete and utter perfection (utopia). ‘Let the market decide’ seems to be an answer which suggests any possible conceivable flaw I could possibly conjure up is something that can be dealt with by an entrepeneur from some place at some time. Also, I am looking here for sociological structures, not free market solutions - sociology cannot be simplified to an economic science.

17

If I take “monied interests” to mean “consumers”, then this actually a trusim, and exactly what I said in my OP.

If I take this as the standard objection to libertarian anarchism that “the rich will rule”, then refer to point #8 in Roderick Long’s Responses to 10 Objections.

Even if I accept this as likely to happen, I would still point out that this kind of horror is more likely - easier to get away with (see Franklin case) - with a monopoly on law than with a free market. So this cannot count as a point against anarchy.

Also it is far easier to topple the “monied class” than it is the political class. (Of course, in the current system, these two classes work together, but without political support, the monied class are always at the mercy of consumers, who can topple them - quickly and without fuss - simply by spending their money elsewhere. A political revolution is far harder to achieve.)

But I do not accept your vision as a likely result of anarchy. For the same reason that it is the mass consumer that determines what kinds of food gets produced by a free market in food, it will be the mass consumer that determines what laws gets produced by a free market in law. In fact, this is actually even more true of law than it is of food, because a court’s profitability is even more dependent on having a good reputation than a food producer. A dishonest court that awards particular court decisions in favor of the highest bidder will not survive competition. Courts must produce for the masses.

I wish I had a crystal ball too :wink:

As for slippery slope, this is no more of a slippery slope than any other matter of legal jurisprudence.

Well I do not share your pessimism.

Lastly, I would like to point out that pessimism about the consequences of anarchy is also no reason to reject it. See Kinsella on What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist. I think I recall David Friedman saying that, while he expects anarchic laws to be “largely libertarian”, he is pessimistic about the likelihood of them being absolutely libertarian. But his pessimism does not lead him to abandon the idea of anarchy and instead support a State, even a minarchic one which will enforce libertarian laws (which no State can do entirely because a State is inherently unlibertarian).

18

OK, that’s fine then. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t misunderstanding the context in which he was speaking, because mistaking political philosophy for legal entrepreneurial speculation is something I’ve seen lots of newbies here do, and many experienced posters fail to point out when they are changing the context from one to the other.

This is possibly an obvious point, but to find a flaw in anarchy, that flaw must not be a flaw in the context of a monopoly on law as well. A “flaw” like ‘its difficult to know when a child is better off being removed from his parents’ is not a point against anarchy, because its just as difficult to know this with a State. (I’m not saying you don’t know this, ESF, just making the point). To be a flaw in anarchy, it must be something that the market can’t solve but the State can.

And yet, what could this possibly be? The State is simply defined as an organisation with a monopoly on law; it cannot solve problems that private institutions cannot solve, it can only make laws that favor itself (like making theft-by-itself, taxation, legal), and create additional monopolies (like monopolies in money and education) and cartels (like banking and pharmaceutical cartels). Aggression is the only thing that a State can do that a firm in a free market cannot.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Can you say more?

19

No but I need to know why the market can solve these issues better than the state. Not only does the market have to solve the issues better but the net benefits must also exceed the net costs (if any) of the actual transition phrase to anarchy.

That the issues (such as child abuse) caused as a result of the complex relationships people share with one another in a society cannot be solved by mechanical market structures like supply and demand but can only be solved by sociological features that occur naturally as a result of the transition phrase to a free society like, for example the extended family. That is why I prefer Clayton’s extended family solution over some sort of service that an entrepeneur can provide.

20

I think you’re looking at the situation all wrong. My position is as follows. As human beings, we should all desire children to live and prosper so it’s insane to prevent anyone who wants to contribute to a child’s well-being from doing so*. In other words, if John Doe Philanthropist wants to write a check to Tommy Child, there should be no law preventing him from doing so. However, support to children consists of much more than just money, it also includes playing with them, teaching them, hanging out with them, and so on. Parenting rights actually are not so much the right to do these things - anyone already has that right by the above principle that we should all desire human children to live and prosper. Rather, parenting rights consist in the much more specific power to selectively exclude others from providing support to their children. This power is ultimately a protective power, the primary reason a parent would want to exclude someone from providing support for their child is precisely because they believe that support is self-seeking in some way, such as a pedophile hanging out with a kid and giving the kid gifts to earn its trust. It this protective power of exclusion that I think must be handed off in some kind of rational priority order.

Now, let’s look at the mechanics of a particular dispute. Alice is a single mother. She is an alcoholic and she beats her young son Bob when she’s angry. Charlie is a truly well-motivated stranger that just doesn’t like to see a kid being beaten up by an adult, even if that adult happens to be a parent. Note that stopping an abuse is the same thing as providing support, just in the negative.

One day, Charlie sees Alice beating Bob and decides to take action. He gets some evidence that Alice was beating Bob to back up his legal case then shows up at Alice’s front door-step to forcibly take custody of the child. At this point Alice calls her PDA and Bob’s PDA also shows up and the standoff is sent to court to be decided.

At this point, the dispute is of the following nature. Charlie’s position is “I am providing support for your son by preventing you from abusing him.” Alice’s position is “I’m the parent, I have the right to exclude you from attempting to care for my son.” There are two sides to this. First of all, Alice certainly has the power to exclude since she is the genetic parent, however, by our first principle that we should all desire to see human children live and prosper, she doesn’t have the right to both exclude support from others and refuse to provide that support herself. In the case of abuse, we can say it this way, a parent doesn’t have the right to exclude abuse-prevention from a stranger and abuse the child. The parent can only exclude abuse-prevention if he or she is not abusing the child. However, the parent can restore his or her right to exclude abuse-prevention simply by stopping abuse. So, in this case where Charlie has actual evidence of Alice’s abuse of Bob, Alice should agree to some kind of monitoring to prove she is not abusing Bob if she wants to prevent Charlie from intervening.

However, the legal liability for intervention must be unlimited. If a parent can later show that he or she was not, in fact, abusive or the case was irregular, or what have you, and the original decision is overturned, the entire period of time for which the child was removed from the parent’s custody must be categorized as kidnapping and all penalties for this must apply. Otherwise, you have a situation where strangers - such as pedophiles - can go fishing for cases where a parent doesn’t have good legal representation or whatever. The only way to stop this is to make sure that whensoever the parent can raise a proper legal defense - even if it is ten years into the future - the legal shyster will be punished for the true magnitude of his or her crime.

Also, I reject the concept of “abusive parent”. Legally, there should be no such concept, only “parental abuse.” The former is a psychological theory. The latter is simply a matter of determining what, in fact, has happened. I’m deeply suspicious of ad hoc psychological theories invented by legal activists to serve their own ends. In the example, even if Charlie wins the right to prevent abuse of Bob by Alice, this does not constitute a transfer of custody from Alice to Charlie since the matter at hand was not the psychological question of whether Alice is an abusive parent but, rather, whether Alice retains the right to prevent Charlie from intervening to stop an act of abuse.

Clayton -

*Actually, I want to reword this a little… by virtue of being a human being (having human DNA and the genetic impulse to human survival), I have a legitimate interest in the life and prosperity of any human child and, therefore, no one should have the right to prevent me from providing support to a child if I want to… except a parent (or, more generally, a guardian).

Here's a tough one: probable child sex