Yeah, that’s what I meant. But we know from economic reasoning that markets are superior to monopolies. All the rest is detail. Like, we can talk about why, in particular, a free market in education, say, is superior to a monopoly of education. But it is, or should be, sufficient (for those who’ve grasped this simple economic truth) to say that a free market in education is superior to a monopoly of education simply because this is true whenever free markets are compared to monopolies. The critic of a free market in law, who supports free markets in other industries, has to explain why law is an exception to the general rule.
The transition to anarchy is really a whole seperate issue, and a big and important one. As you mentioned on the other thread, you are not quite convinced about the viability of anarchism, so I think it is first necessary for me to try to convince you that the goal is worth having, i.e. anarchy is superior to statism. Then we can talk about the potential costs of a transition to come to a conclusion whether the benefits of anarchy outweight those costs. If you’re not yet convinced that anarchy will deliver any benefit over what we have now, it seems premature to start considering what the costs of a transition might be.
But since you brought it up… Personally, I’m quite optimistic that the costs of a transition will be relatively low, and certainly outweighed by the full benefits that will come when the transition is complete. In my opinion, secessionism (rather than, say, privatization) is the lowest cost transition strategy. (Maybe start a new thread if you want to discuss this though, as its very off-topic).
Really? Because I agree with pretty much everything that follows in your post. Perhaps we’re just looking at the situation from different angles.
While I agree, I wouldn’t word it like that. It sounds like you’re deriving ought from is, the “is” being informed by evolutionary psychology, in particular the theory of genetic altruism. Rather I would say that it is an empirical observation that children require a special kind of protection due to their immaturity, and that human beings tend to recognize this; we all strongly recognize that adults and children are not-alike in a very important sense: we recognize the validity of the idea of childhood, where somebody has parenting rights over the child.
I think this is a wonderful definition of parenting rights, or, in my OP phraseology, the right to raise a child. I will adopt it.
Yes, I would think that any court that awarded the parenting rights to Friends-of-Babies when an uncle is claiming the rights would fail due to competition. Obviously, if there are no relatives - which was supposed in my scenario from the beginning - the reputable Friends-of-Babies organization would be higher in the priority order than some single man, possibly a pedophile, claiming the child directly (rather than being screened by Friends-of-Babies for his suitability as a foster parent).
So no disagreement here. Free market courts will hand parental rights off by some kind of rational priority order. Competition impels them to do so.
Your whole scenario is not different from mine in any significant way. Your solution is also identical to mine, or rather, to Walter Block’s. You are just using different terms to Block. He describes it in terms of abandonment theory.
Combining your terms with Block’s, if Alice both excludes support from others and refuses to provide that support herself, she is abandoning her right to raise the child. Thus the right to raise the child can be (re-)homesteaded. If Alice, who is abusing the child, prevents Charlie from helping the child, she is guilty of the crime of forestalling (defined as “preventing someone from homesteading property”).
Yes, OK, you are just saying that even though Alice has abandoned her parental right to raise the child, she can herself re-homestead the right she abandoned - by stopping the abuse. But what if this continues? At some point, Charlie ought to be able to take her to court for forstalling, so long as he has enough evidence to persuade that court that 1) Alice really was an abuser (really had abandoned the right), and, if he wants to claim full parental rights for himself, 2) that he is a suitable foster parent, and there is no other more suitable claimant to be found (like a relative).
Agree 100%.
I agree, sort of. If we define “parental abuse” as “actions taken by the owner of the right to raise a child which constitute abandonment of that right” then it is a precise legal definition. Making that definition more concrete is, of course, the task of legal entrepreneurs, and to be determined largely by customs, i.e. customary law.
An “abusive parent” therefore simply means “an individual who has committed parental abuse”. I don’t see how this is any less of a precise legal term than “parental abuse” itself. I do not mean by it some kind of psychological theory. But maybe I missed your point.
Overall, I’d say we agree with each other completely Clayton, but our terminological differences might make it seem otherwise.
The only societies where child abuse does not occur are idealized or utopian ones. It is a given that child abuse will always exist, but the question is: what kind of society will best succeed at limiting the amount of child abuse that occurs? The answer has got to be, ceteris paribus, an anarchic one.
@Wibee: Yep. The really sad part is that the majority of child abuse is systemic. Children are abused in so many ways precisely because the system creates the rules in such a way that they are going to be abused. I don’t think it’s because those within the system want children to be abused but because they don’t feel the costs of their mistakes. Just another example where disconnecting consequences from decisions leads to bad outcomes.
I think you’re reading into my arguments against AnCap slightly wrong. My arguments are not that AnCap would be less prosperous on the whole as such (I understand what is wrong with saying ‘on the whole’ - I am just being lazy) but that some people would ‘get left behind’. I explained this in far more detail here: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/education-and-voluntarism/17638/257
I’d be interested to know whether you would prefer superhuman progress and only a few people living in (absolute) poverty or moderate progress and no-one living in (absolute) poverty. My thoughts in terms of the prevention of child abuse are the same.
Capitalism is the ‘wealth generator’ so to speak but the state is the ‘wealth redistributor’. Having said that, I only want minimalised wealth redistribution so to speak.
Block’s model might apply to children of a certain age but I’m specifically thinking of very young children, from birth to about 7 or 8 years old where most children are very easily manipulated into accepting obviously unacceptable situations (consider the Elizabeth Smart case or the Shawn Hornbeck case, these are much older children still easily coerced into a horrible situation). For these children, homesteading is the wrong model because homesteading implies that children are a physical resource which can be improved. If children from birth to 7 or 8 years of age are a resource, pray tell, what sort of resource are they and what sorts of improvements could entrepreneurs make to them in order to resell at a profit the rights they bought? The fact is that children in this age range have no other value than as offspring of their genetic parents and other relatives.
Older children might be able to work to pay for their room and board and so might be a valuable resource and the homesteading model might be able to be applied but children in such dire circumstances must also be presumed to be emancipated so that they are free to flee their would-be guardians. Otherwise, you get 19th century Britain child labor. In other words, it should be up to the child to decide whether the cure (de facto servitude) is worse than the disease (homelessness).
In my model (by contrast to the current legal system), “custody” per se could never be revoked because anyone who cares to do so may care for the child (including an abusive parent) so long as the guardian does not exclude them, except in the case where natural guardianship has been reversed (see below). I think it would be best to follow a policy of augmented caretaking rather than transfer of custody in most cases where there is neglect or abuse. In other words, what Charlie would win - if he won - in his dispute with Alice is the right not to be excluded from caring for Bob by Alice. He would not win the right to exclude Alice or anyone else from caring for Bob. Note, however, that Charlie forcibly intervening to prevent Alice from beating Bob is not Charlie excluding Alice from providing care to Bob. Rather, he is simply providing care for Bob by preventing Alice from harming him. So, caretaking would simply be augmented by addition of caretakers who cannot be refused by the parent.
Thinking along these lines a little further, imagine that in addition to abusing her child, Alice also neglects him and permits all sorts of dangerous people to come around him. These people are a danger to Bob, one of them might kidnap him and so on. Charlie sees this dangerous situation and wants the power to protect Bob from the dangers that Alice is not protecting him from. Following a similar line as above, Charlie collects some evidence of Alice’s neglect then shows up on her doorstep and explains that he intends to protect Bob from her dangerous friends. The PDAs show up and the case goes to court.
Now, in this case, Charlie is seeking the protective or guardian power, not just a caretaking right. If he wins, Charlie would now have the power to exclude people from caring for Bob. This power is extremely dangerous to be granted to genetic strangers so (a) there must be no one else more closely related to Bob in line ahead of Charlie or who is a genetic stranger but has provably invested more capital into Bob and (b) if such a person wasn’t around at the time the case was decided but later shows up, Charlie’s right to exclude cannot apply to them and the guardian power must be liable to be reassigned back to the person with higher priority. Even in this case, Charlie still has not won the right to exclude Alice from caring for Bob, he has only won the right to exclude the dangerous people hanging around Bob from caring for him (or being around him at all). From a protection point of view, Charlie is actually in a power-sharing relationship with Alice.
The reversal of natural guardianship - the power to completely exclude a genetic parent from caring for his or her child in the way that most genetic parents have the power to exclude others from caring for their child - must be reserved for only the most extreme cases and should always go to another genetic relative except in those tragic cases where there just isn’t any. The world is an extremely dangerous place for children in this unfortunate situation. For this reason, the door for reform of the genetic parent must always be held open. To extend the above example, let’s say Alice is constantly thrashing Bob and neglecting him so Alice’s parents step in and sue to have the power to exclude Alice from caring for Bob - reversing natural guardianship. In today’s system, this power is regularly exercised by the State, ex-spouses, step-parents, child protection agencies, abuse shelters, religious organizations and just about any Tom, Dick or Harry who prints a business card to the effect of caring for kids. As a divorcee, I have been victimized by this system which is why I’ve given it a lot of thought.
Block’s model applies precisely to children of this age group. My scenario was a 3-year-old for a reason.
From the economic point-of-view, children ARE a physical resource which can be improved. To “improve” a child is to raise it. Do you object to my referring to children as “physical”, or “a resource”? (Because later on you say, “invest capital into the child”, which certainly sounds like you are comfortable with both terms). Obviously, this is not to say that children are “just a resource”. There is a crucial difference between a non-human resource and a human resource, but the latter is still a resource in the economic sense.
You are using the term entrepreneur in the narrow sense, meaning someone who seeks monetary profits. While it may sound horrific to some people, we Austrians should be comfortable with the idea of a free market in rights to raise children. I would have no objection to an entrepreneur buying the rights to raise a child, with the intention of selling that right later at a higher price. (Note that since the price of the right to raise a child will probably decrease as the child gets older, and the rights are costly to hold anyway, such an entrepreneur would not want to hold on to the rights for very long. Think of a profit-making adoption agency, which profits from connecting buyers and sellers, not from making improvements to the product in between.)
As Rothbard explained, as libertarians we should fully support such a market being free, because (unsurprisingly, really) a free market is superior to a monopoly here too.
I can’t tell if you support a free market in raising children or not. Can you confirm?
Anyway, I posited that Friends-of-Babies are a charity, precisely because I am not totally sure whether or not such an organization would be viable as a (monetary-) profit-making firm. It may be viable, in which case great, because then it will probably more efficient. But if its not viable, then I am sure the same role will be carried out by a charity. So rather than make this assumption of viability, I decided simply to posit Friends-of-Babies as a charity.
This is a remarkable statement, easily shown to be false. As I said earlier, not all wannabe foster parents are wannabe abusers. Do you disagree with this?
Also, since you skipped it earlier, I’ll ask you again: how do you explain the fact that, even today, people donate money to organizations dedicated to helping out unrelated children who are in bad situations?
People clearly DO value other people’s children. If they didn’t we’d all just say “who cares what parents do to their kids, they don’t carry my genes”. But we don’t all say this. ‘What about the children?’ is a very popular theme for threads around here. How do you explain this, if young children only have value to their genetic relatives?
If I may summarise the rest of your post. You are saying that one of the following four situations can occur.
Alice has full parental rights, i.e. she can exclude anyone from caring for Bob, including Charlie.
Alice and Charlie both have partial parental rights. Alice can exclude anyone from caring for Bob, except Charlie.
Alice and Charlie both have partial parental rights. Charlie can exclude anyone from caring for Bob, except Alice.
Charlie has full parental rights, i.e. she can exclude anyone from caring for Bob, including Alice.
You are saying that 1 > 2 > 3 > 4, i.e. 1 is ideal, 2 is second-best, 3 is third-best and 4 is only for the most extreme cases. I agree with you. I am confident that free market courts will see it this way too.
ESF, I am not going to respond to this because its way off-topic, and would require quite a lengthy reply to unpick it all. In short, I disagree with several of your premises. If you feel like it, start a new thread for it. Maybe title it “Does AnCap leave people behind?”
Everything in your post before this question is irrelevant to the discussion. The market in child adoption is an entirely different issue than forcible re-assignment of parenting rights. There might be a market for adoption of children who have been forcibly removed from their parents (essentially, free-market foster parenting) but the entrepreneurs in this market have to stand in line behind everybody else, including even friends and associates of the parents and/or the child. The only interests being served in the adoption market are the interests of the consumers (the foster parents), therefore, it should be the final alternative to all others and a child in such a situation should enjoy enhanced rights against his guardians vis-a-vis natural parents or other parenting arrangements, in other words, the child should be freer to run away (I don’t accept Rothbardian non-aggression when applied to the parent-child relationship).
What I’m trying to say is that the child qua child has no value to anyone because it is a human being. If you buy a hammer, you can use it to build a house (producer good). If you buy a house, you can enjoy living in the house (consumer good). If you buy a child, what can you produce with it without engaging in slavery? And what can it possibly mean to “consume” a child? Child rape? Cannibalism? I agree that an adoption market would be selling the opportunity to parent a child and this is definitely something which can be consumed (the parenting experience) but the child itself cannot be consumed.
Actually, this is perfectly in line with and supports my central thesis that every human being has an interest (or “right”, if you like, though that word is overused) in the life and prosperity of every child on the planet. What I mean by that is that it’s aggression for one stranger to prevent another stranger from helping any child. The only people who possess a right to exclude support or help to a child are the child’s parents because they have the guardian power. The vast amounts of money donated in causes to help children simply go to support this thesis.
Excellent summary. I guess I should have just written that instead of the wall of text…
Are children property or humans? If they are property, at what age do they become humans? Is the age of switching from property to human arbitrary or logically defined? Is the age averaged over the population or is it different for every child? Are children somehow special cases of human?
In anarchy, if children are property then they can be bought, sold, traded, used, abused, etc. in any way the owner likes, just like a chair. If children are humans, then they have the right to choose what they want and if they make a ‘bad’ choice no one should stop them (bad is a value judgement). The same could be said for an adult who stays in an abusive relationship.
If children are somehow special cases of humans that need to be looked after by society then does this extend to mentally handicapped adults? What about only mildly handicapped? What about people with just a low IQ? What about people who repeatedly make poor life choices? What about intelligent adults in a foreign land where they can’t speak the language (can’t communicate), do they fall into the category of ‘society should choose for them’?
OK, good, never mind then. You had me worried there for a second.
Yes, I think part of the mix up might be the use of the phrase “buy a child”. Of course this does not mean the same as “buy a hammer” because you can do just about anything peaceful with a hammer and not your lose your rights to it, but with a child there are more stipulations about what you can and cannot do with it, i.e. you must raise the child, and not abuse it, if you want to keep your rights to it. “Buy a child” is really just shorthand for “buy the rights to raise a child” or “buy the parental/guardianship rights to a child”. I shall have to be more careful in future to use the longer form to avoid this possible confusion.
Have you read either of the papers I linked to in the OP?
Have you read any of what Clayton or I have written this thread?
It becomes tiresome to read these same questions/objections again and again. They have been addressed and resolved, if you take the time to read about it and think it through.
Who the heck is society? Can society look after someone? Can society act? Can society choose? (You are going to keep getting called on this, by the way; it is a serious methodological error.)
You do raise a good point though, which is that Block’s abandonment theory doesn’t (or need not) just apply to children.
There is nothing particularly special about the category childhood, except that it is the most obvious example of a group that needs special legal status. I expect the severely mentally handicapped would be a similar category, where it is recognized that guardianship rights apply. There would be a different set of actions that would be considered abuse/abandonment of this right as compared to abuse/abandonment of parental rights. I don’t expect any of those other groups you mention would be considered a special legal category, but I’m guessing. If enough consumers want these kinds of laws (and are prepared to pay for them) than they will be produced.
Note that another group that may get a special legal category would be animals. Block’s abandonment theory solves the whole worry about “animal rights” as well. Some animals may be placed in a special legal category, where abuse of them constitutes abandonment, and hence the animals can be rescued from their abusers the exact way children would be. Thanks to Block, we no longer have to be apologists for animal abusers: animal abuse could be considered unlibertarian.
It seems to me that you are proposing that some humans have full rights to liberty and some humans have limited rights to liberty. This seems to go against the underlying philosophy of individualism, though perhaps you do not support individualism (I am not familiar with your political beliefs).
It seems that the line you are drawing as to who gets liberty and who doesn’t is set by the majority. By this logic, if the majority of people think red heds should not be allowed liberty, then red heds won’t get liberty. Do you agree with this statement?
I’ll discuss this with you if you like (in a new thread though please), but it will save us both a lot of time if you read David Friedman’s Police, Courts, and Laws first. Thanks.
It seems that the line you are drawing as to who gets liberty and who doesn’t is set by the majority. By this logic, if the majority of people think red heds should not be allowed liberty, then red heds won’t get liberty. Do you agree with this statement?
I take more of a legal realist stance. I have no idea what a “right to liberty” is so how can anyone have one? Rather, look at the problem in terms of actual or potential disputes. I feed my kid cheese puffs but my neighbor thinks this is neglect and attempts to prevent me from feeding cheese puffs to my kid. This is a dispute and the dispute is between me and my neighbor. Or, I tell my kid to go to his room and he stomps his feet and says “no!” at which I threaten to swat him on the backside if he doesn’t go. The same neighbor sees this as abuse and not only abuse but a dispute between me and my child. However, it is a serious mistake to characterize this as a dispute between me and my child since my child is incapable of asserting himself in a court of law. So, the dispute is still between me and my neighbor if the neighbor tries to intervene.
Children do not have the right to drive cars, operate lawnmowers, cash paychecks and any number of things that you do every day and take for granted, as an adult. This is part of the reason that egoism breaks down on close inspection, IMO.
I agree that egoism breaks down here unless you assume children (and mentally handicapped, etc.) to be equal to all other humans. If you consider them to be some kind of second-class human then yes, egoism breaks down. I feel that this breakdown (if allowed to occur by not classifying all humans equally) also leads to the breakdown of anarchy which depends on egoism and you are left with minarchy. At the minimum, are left with majority based laws that define who is gets treated equally and who gets treated unequally. In this example children and likely the mentally handicapped fall into the category of unequal but it could be extended however much the majority decides (all the way to red-heads if that’s what the majority wants).
I have no idea about anarchy or minarchy (I have no vested interest in either social outcome), but the principle of the State - special legal privileges reserved by a designated group surrounding the Prince - is not entailed by the fact that children cannot be treated as adults in a court of law. Those who get treated equally (in a court of law) are those who can speak for themselves. Those who cannot speak for themselves cannot, of course, be treated equally so these individuals require an advocate.
No, it’s not about majority, it’s about who can or cannot hire an arbitrator in a free market of law.
Whether children are labeled as property or as humans is irrelevent.
Easy.
People who care to rescue the child will kick down the doors of the abuser, rescue the child and take their chances. The absuer will try to accuse the rescuers of kidnapping. The rescuers will demonstrate that they were saving the child.
In the end, the insurance company of the abuser will likely have a clause that says his protection is void if there is evidence that he abuses children. Abusers will live next door to abusers and normal people will live next door to normal people.
