Dave Scotese — According to the LA Times, the law says, “If a parent caused a child’s death through abuse or neglect, then the other 
children in that parent’s care can be made court dependents, and child welfare workers can remove them from their home.” In other words, if you screw up once in a big enough way, then the state will come along and isolate you from those who care most about you. The LA Times says it sounds logical, at first: “… if government ever is justified in taking children from their parents, that’s when it should be done.”
While the mainstream media tends to do the bidding of the rulers, often without realizing it, more and more people are waking up to the true nature of government as an organization that enjoys an unhealthy sanction to violate fellow citizens. We provide that sanction – the citizens – until we exhibit civil disobedience or take another road less traveled. The best civil disobedience is the violation of laws in order to maintain one’s ethics. Another road less traveled can be explored at the Fully Informed Jury Association, where the primary function of a jury, to judge the law, is spelled out.
Consider Mr. C from the LA Times article, who decided that getting his daughter to the hospital was more important than obeying the child-restraint laws. This is someone attempting to be a better parent than the state wants people to be. This is a man who is removing his sanction, at least to some degree. Now that the state has punished him for flaunting legislation by taking his remaining children from him, his obstinacy grows. He now argues “that the law could be used in absurd ways”, as if the loss of his living children isn’t already absurd.
The unnamed writer explains, “Yes, parents should use the proper car seats for their children.” “Proper” here can only mean “legal”, since Mr. C drove his 18-month old with a relative who held the baby in her lap. Relatives are apparently less proper child restraints than a “certified child safety seat”. Is there any insidious propaganda here? Perhaps not.
The last sentence has all the trimmings of excellent writing: “When the law confronts a parent with the possibility of losing his children regardless of the choice he makes, perhaps the problem is not with the parent, but with the law.” This seems logical and agreeable, at first. However, when the law does not confront a parent with such a dire possibility in such restrictive situations, the problem is still with the law. What is a law, after all?
A law in any realm other than legislation is a tool we use to invent and predict. Legislated laws are promoted as tools to invent and predict, but when the inventions and predictions prove more beneficial to the private sector than to the government, legislation changes.
Legislated law is inherently violent because it is useful only to the degree to which it will be enforced, either through implied threats, or positive violation of the rights of those who ignore it. When legislated law doesn’t need to be enforced, there is no use in creating it. A better approach in that case is to publish a whitepaper, or offer a seminar.
Who then, you might ask, has the right to tear a family apart when one of the parents is destructive to the rest of the family? If we don’t agree to let the group we call “the state” and its minions we call “social workers” do it, then no one would do it. Some people think that would be terrible, and that is because they lack faith in Mother Nature. When the illusion of security that blinds friends and neighbors is finally starved to death through rampant tax avoidance, the family with the destructive parent will find its own ways to heal. For now, we have one arm of a parasitic leviathan supporting that illusion, so we can ignore the destructive parent in peace… at least until some writer who dares to put his name on his writing stands out to remind us that the state is a parasite.
The social workers and the judge should be put on trial for taking this man’s children away from him. During that trial, some other facts not in this article, but in another, written by Maura Dolan, and referred to in a comment by “camorton”, would come to light:
“County social workers received a report a week later that Valerie’s siblings, Ethan, 3, and Jesus, 8 months old, were being neglected…. After more than a year in foster care, his children were returned to him after he took several parenting courses…. ‘This was a family that was greatly in need of social services,’ [Kim Nemoy, principal deputy county counsel] said.”
The report came from a person who may have attempted to get William C. to learn better parenting skills, or it may have come from someone who was tired of the screaming his two kids did. The state is a tool that can be used for all kinds of reasons, but it is the only tool that provides coercion as a means to achieve your ends. It’s also a crutch for those of us who like to be negligent in our neighborly relations.
Thanks to that coercion, there is no way currently to determine the market price of the intervention that (presumably) made this man’s parenting skills tolerable enough for the state to let him have his children back. The service it provided cost more than it would have if the private sector performed it. In CAPDM’s report, Government, Industry, and Privatization, the conclusion explains that “… and the trend towards privatization, have been accompanied by a considerable increase in productive efficiency.” This is tempered with a warning about “allocative inefficiency” that may have increased. This means not providing services people don’t want, and providing more of the services people do want.
The private sector, if left to its own, may not have performed the service at all. Many people think this would be terrible; but are they charitable enough to give up some or all of what they are currently paying in taxes in order to provide that service? It is a sickness specifically of democracy that people think a lack of service is terrible even when they wouldn’t pay for themselves, but on which they would happily spend other people’s money. Given the intractability of this disease of democracy, what is the best way to assess what is good parenting?
The answer will not appease those who look for easy solutions to implement. The problem lies in the framing of the question. For many people, it comes down to a choice between some body of parents, some appointed or elected body of government employees, or a mix between the two. In all cases, the decision is officially removed from the individuals closest to the situation. The best way to determine what is good parenting – or, rather, what parenting is bad enough to justify interfering – is up to you and everyone else close to a situation in which parenting skills are lacking. The multitude of answers and opinions will compete and cause disagreements and arguments, but everyone involved will take personal responsibility for their own interference.
This is natural, common, neighborly social interaction, and something that easy answers and monolithic solutions obviate to the severe (subtle, insidious, and persistent) degradation of society. This, in essence, is why states eventually fail. The answer is personal responsibility.
But there must be boundaries, no? Where should they be set? So one kid was saved by not wearing the restraint and the father pays a fine. There are always exceptions to laws, but perhaps that law saved 10 or 50 other children whose parents would not properly restrain them without the fear of a fine or penalty. Which is better, saving 1 child or 50?
So… you think it is RIGHT to use FORCE to keep alive the children of parents whose genes should obviously be eliminated from the gene pool?
The boundary of which you speak is clearly set in the 5th commandment, if you’re religious, or in property rights, if you hold to natural law, or in utilitarianism, which shows that respecting ownership leads to better outcomes for everyone involved by avoiding the tragedy of the commons. This boundary implies that if anyone is going to spend any money to do anything, it will be money that person earned, not money stolen from the general public under the presumed sanction of that public.
if you spend the same amount of money and everything remains relatively unaffected, it’s better to save 50 children. This is true whether you kill 10,000 people or save 10,000 adults’ lives as a side effect of your operation. But clearly, the saving of the children pales in comparison to the other effects. Check out Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson for a more detailed explanation of this point.
Awesome post Dave. You are such a clear thinker and well said, “what parenting is bad enough to justify interfering – is up to you and everyone else close to a situation.” Reading a bunch of books on the history of child rearing in America right now and a large portion of the kids taken from their parents when it first became the state’s “right” to do so were not abused or neglected children, they were just kids of poor, recent immigrant, non-Christians.
So how would you go about enforcing the 5th Commandment, or any equivalent Section of the Qu’ran. Should we go back to Religious Sects ruling the people, because that worked so well during the Middle Ages. Regardless, you get back to the need for a State of some form, don’t you?
Don, in many cases I would say we do need a state, at least for now. read my latest post http://greenheritagenews.com/buried-alive-state-intervention-in-parental-crimes/ in which we see a father killing his child. Who intervenes here?
Perhaps we get back to a state of some form, one might say. Do we need to get back to a group of people who steals from others with public sanction? If you accept that as the essence of the state, then we absolutely do not get back to one. If that is missing from whatever you mean by “state”, then it doesn’t matter. The article is about how that group we call “the state” tries to justify its theft.
It is not difficult (when no one threatens you) to hire some bouncers, investigators, etc., a posse, essentially, and operate your own little anti-theft enforcement unit for anyone who wants to enforce the 5th commandment and is willing to pay you to do it. Be ethical and transparent, and you’ll be “some form of the state”, but you won’t be stealing. I think that’s what you’re looking for.
Well, Ernest, there are family members. There are neighbors. There is community, and that is what we need, a more understanding community of mankind, not a government or a state regulating how we should feel, think or act, because that is simply a politically motivated entity that becomes it’s own, selfish personality after awhile. Nice piece BTW.
The article may be about taxation and sanctioned theft, but the ideal used in the argument is the need, or lack of need, for a state. If you want to discuss taxes, fine, but your article and its title suggests that the state declares an aura of moral legitimacy because it acts, sometimes against its own constituents wishes. But that is why a governing body is created in the first place, to make decisions for the betterment of the whole, not for one person or 2 or 3.
This is like saying, we’re discussing the essence of life, the ideals, the philosophy, but we shall ignore the all too human need for blood to pump through the body. But without blood, there is no life, so there is not thought, there is no philosophy and there is no idealism. So what comes first, the chicken or the egg? The fact is, it doesn’t matter. One needs the other. Without the chicken, there is no egg. Without eggs, there are no more chickens.
If you get back to some form of state, as you suggest, inevitably, you will get back to those who need, and those who have, and some intervening form, a “state”, will have to step in and decide what is in the best interest of all involved. Eventually, as this entity forms, it will begin to decide what is best for the state, so that it survives. Then it will have to take what it needs to survive.
You suggest that one can “hire” what it needs to take care of issues that all humans, in a social context, eventually face?
Do you not think that this is how the “state” began in the first place? Did not the volunteer militia in the colonies become the guard, the armed guard, the national guard, and then the armed forces? Did not the Pinkertons, a private agency, become the foundation of the secret service? Over time, these grand ideals you have, much like the forefathers had, become perverted by their own purpose.
You can cry statism and cloak yourself in voluntaryism, but it all boils down to humanism. Humans need and want things. They collect them and, to further themselves as a race, they pass them on. But other humans come along and they want these things, feel they deserve them. Then they develop a need for a governing body to sort them out, who actually should have and pay for these things.
You argued: The article is about how that group we call “the state” tries to justify its theft.
Yet in the article you say: Who then, you might ask, has the right to tear a family apart when one of the parents is destructive to the rest of the family? If we don’t agree to let the group we call “the state” and its minions we call “social workers” do it, then no one would do it. Some people think that would be terrible, and that is because they lack faith in Mother Nature.
This intervention has nothing to do with taxation. Perhaps a family is weaker than this predator needs help. Should no one step in? And if they do, who should pay for it and how?
I think you cloud “government” and “state” with the IRS and politics. These are entirely different beasts.
Regarding the chicken and egg problem, I’m not making predictions or explaining the past (regarding states and taxes), but rather suggesting that we avoid sanctioning theft.
“Then it will have to take what it needs to survive.”
This is a bit of a misconception. That which exists MAY attempt to take what it needs to survive, and it may fail, which is what I recommend we aim for. Our institutions (families, businesses, governments, etc.) can attempt to get what they need to survive either through voluntary trades or through coercion. The “state” you describe – or that institution that mediates between those who have and those who want also has this choice. If it chooses (as it does today) to use coercion, it will cause a lot of suffering (as it does today).
Your use of the phrase “use the state” does apply to me. It would also mean that if a gang locked me in a cage and stole some food during their gang warfare operations and then gave me some so that I wouldn’t starve, I would be using gang warfare. It’s a moot point, though, given that I have no other choice. The trick for me is to remember that if and when I escape, I should be prepared to earn my food and shelter, rather than have it provided by criminals. This is the basis of my suggestion regarding what you should do about the problem.
You are right that I cloud “government” and “state” with the IRS and politics. A “government” that doesn’t steal would be great. Likewise, a “state” that mediates between those who have and those who want without initiating aggression in order to support itself would be great. Calling such voluntaryist organizations “government” and “state” is a bit confusing because the “governments” and “states” we currently have rely heavily on theft and coercion.
The root of the problem, really, isn’t the coercion and theft and violence on which states and governments rely. The problem is with our sanction of it – and even encouragement. It’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where the criminals who have caged me and provided me with food somehow turn into my cherished providers. That is what we need to reverse, and recognizing the ways those criminals dress themselves in an aura of moral legitimacy is a good first step. Planning for how you’d get your food and shelter when the criminals free you is a good second step.
So perhaps we should have voluntary elections on the Internet, that go beyond physical borders, and frame a new Declaration of Independence. Work against the existing thieves to build a proactive, cooperative Capitalistic Society. frame a government based on participation and acceptance, and then build this movement peacefully. That is the type of answer I’m fishing for.
Again, even in your trapped cage allegory still doesn’t fly with me, though: “It would also mean that if a gang locked me in a cage and stole some food during their gang warfare operations and then gave me some so that I wouldn’t starve, I would be using gang warfare.”
There is an option even in that scenario so that you would not partake of the proceeds of the gang/theft. You could hunger strike. Passive resistance. Ghandi did it. Thomas Ashe and the Gang of Twelve did, as have many others. And in this case, we’re talking starving yourself of roads, etc. My whole point was, if you yourself don’t want to suffer in the process of changing the status quo, don’t throw out a blanket condemnation of others who do not as well, offer a viable solution.
Identifying Cancer doesn’t cure Cancer.
A quote of my condemnation would be appreciated. I never mean to condemn anyone unless they are intentionally aggressing against me or people close to me. I do condemn certain behaviors for reasons I try to mention in my condemnation, and I understand that some people will take offense if they realize that they exhibit those behaviors. That’s their problem. When I discover that something I do is causing problems, I will do my best to make amends, not shoot the messenger.
If your voluntary elections are designed to identify people who will then enjoy public sanction for making up and enforcing legislation, then I don’t want any part of it. If they are designed to identify people who make good leaders (but enjoy no sanction for violence), then I think they will be fine, but I don’t see a reason to use them exclusively. We are all capable of finding our own leaders when we need them.
I think the trick while the state is still bumbling around is to think your way around the aura of moral legitimacy with which it tries to deceive. Decide for yourself how you would handle a situation. If it requires breaking some laws, then weigh the risk of being violated for doing your best against the problems that will result from following those laws. Exercise your freedom that way, and let people know whenever the law scares you toward suboptimal behavior. This is especially effective when what you would have done without the law would benefit others. Eventually, people will break laws whenever they think its best, and the enforcers of those laws will ignore it whenever they think its best, and the state will become less and less relevant.
“Some people think that would be terrible, and that is because they lack faith in Mother Nature. When the illusion of security that blinds friends and neighbors is finally starved to death through rampant tax avoidance, the family with the destructive parent will find its own ways to heal.”
Again, I ask, do YOU pay taxes? You condemn people for following laws, such as paying taxes or following seat belt laws, as being ignorant, as if that is the ONLY way to change things because that is what you are sold on, yet you yourself do the same, as you admitted to paying taxes. You also offer no other alternatives, other than ignoring laws when it’s convenient (or I suppose safe for you) and then following them when it is convenient (or most safe for you).
One must make a stand and then fight those laws because they are wrong, or fade into the shadows, irrelevant, whether that is when it’s convenient or not. Henry David Thoreau understood this himself when he wrote, of passive, convenient disobedience, that this course “take(s) too much time, and a man’s life will be gone,” he wrote. “I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”
So I think you must choose passive condemnation with no proposed alternatives and be stubborn, which seems par for the course as you shot my early new Declaration suggestion down, though you easily could have said let’s start there but try this, or find some way to make a stand following your convictions.
There is no “aura” of moral legitimacy that any state claims. They take it, pure and simple, aided by civic pride, control of the education system, and even control of the entertainment industry.
What they don’t control is the human mind. If you don’t like the “authority” you perceive as fake, then remove this illusory curtain so people can see the puppet masters for what they are. Come up with a plan, not hide and wait and hide and wait. Until someone, anyone does this, the authority they hold isn’t fake, it’s real, because it’s normative.