Since we are on the topic, what about the age of major? What should the legal age be? Most countries have it at 18. The higher extreme would be 21 years and the lower extreme would be 15. As a libertarian I would pick the lower extreme as it guarantees more freedom to choose.

I still don’t have a solution I like. I do have a good stopgap WRT social welfare and subsidized babymaking, but nothing else.

The child ends up in the hospital due to the custodial parent. The non-custodial parent does some investigation, finding that the teacher wrote an email to the principal about this child, but the principal decided not to get involved. The non-custodial parent sues the school.

A few cases like that, and schools will start being proactive. Fear of a lawsuit is a very strong incentive.

Ha! So would I, but I didn’t mean to get down into the weeds, just give an example of a possible solution. The problem with doing that is that the answer always begs more questions. I’d rather return to your top-level questions.

It occurs to me that your questions could be rephrased to shift the burden of proof of your original inquiry.

I’ll spare the proofs and offer these as Given:
a) a statuatory construct could not possibly encompass all the circumstances where rational individuals could reasonably disagree as to what constitutes abuse (one-size-fits-all tyranny);
b) a government bureaucracy depends on the “right” people being in place to excercise circumstantial judgement, and;
c) a free market could produce mechanisms which do not suffer from a) or b);

Then:
How can Statists reconcile the LACK of protection afforded to parents and children under a governmental “solution”?

Your suggestion is definitely one to look into… Perhaps the only libertarian answer is that if the childs rights can be shown to be violated, then the parents should be prosecuted for doing so.

The corollary to this is the “caretaker” angle. For example, if I were in the hospital, and a doctor causes me harm by his neglect, he can be held up for civil (and I think criminal) prosecution. While I don’t know how easy it would be to apply that sort of statute towards child-rearing, I could see it solving most of the problem.

Where we still run into a problem is the case VRB brought up from one of Doug’s recent posts. Parents who are Christian Scientists are withholding medical treatment for their kids’ medical problems, thinking that prayer will solve it. I’d contend that this is a case where the neglect statutes could be applied, but it will likely come down to what a jury thinks. I guess there’s always a gray area somewhere, but I wonder just how wide that gray area might be?

If you flesh this out at all on your blog, Brock, feel free to send the link. I’d love to hear it. FYI, a bloody mary (or three) makes a great breakfast :-)

I don’t see altruism or compassion as a libertarian ideal, I think that comes from a moral system. Raising children is a collective endeavor, even if it only involves another parent. In order for a child to grow up an become a responsible member in that society, that society has to be such; that anywhere the child might be, there are consistent boundaries and expectations.

The answer to this question may be as simple as deleting child protective services. My tired, not well thought-out example of how this could work:

Say, for example, a teacher noticed tell-tale signs of child abuse. He could report his observations to the school’s or school’s consortium’s family advocacy office. That office could offer a deal to the parents: cooperate with a private investigation and participate in counseling/courses/separation/whatever or have the office notify the police and let the state do an investigation and criminal prosecution (assault/battery?).

It’s a crude example with more holes than Swiss cheese, but my sense is it would be a fairer, more responsive system than we have now, and still be consistent with a libertarian philosophy. The contract for the school’s services would clearly delineate the parent’s responsibility to participate in the process, the school would have to move quickly to avoid liability, yet, the school would also have to treat the parents as the people they are – customers.

The parent who is guilty of abuse will certainly participate in the entirely free-market process. Those who are not guilty may choose to participate in that process if they wish to retain the school’s services, or let the state investigate and contract for a different school’s services.

That’s just one example of what might work. Perhaps a contract lawyer could chime in, but I would imagine that ALL contracts (phone, inter-tube, mortgage) would eventually have boilerplate language requiring parents to be covered by some sort of “family advocacy program” in the absence of child protective services. Why? Go back to my first sentence. Society WILL rescue the child.

You point out the marginal case well. My question goes beyond changing behavior, though, it goes to the question of when high risk tolerance becomes neglect, and whether society has any obligation to rescue the kid from neglectful parents.

If a parent believes in spanking, we don’t take the child away from the parents. If the parents are beating their children abusively, we do. There is a point at which the parent is a danger to the successful development of a child, and the child should not have to pay for the parent’s sins.

To a statist, there’s nothing inconsistent here. The state knows best, and when they believe you are over the line, they take your child. But to a libertarian, who doesn’t believe the state knows best, this is inconsistent.

Everyone has their own level of risk tolerance. Further, every parent has three levels of risk tolerance: 1) the level of risk to which they are willing to subject an unrelated or unknown child, 2) the level of risk to which they are willing to subject a related or known child and, 3) the level of risk to which they are willing to subject their own child. Because the parent also has a personal risk tolerance level, I would argue that they would be slightly more risk averse with a related or known child than they would be with their own. Their personal risk is higher when subjecting children to risk where personal liability could be leveled against them.

Certainly, though, parents will be least risk averse when it comes to children that they are not related to or do not know. In this case, they and their’s are not personally at risk, therefore, they cannot be less risk tolerant than they are with their own children. The problem with seat belt, car seat, flammable pajama, etc. laws is that they START with the highest level of risk tolerance a parent could have (that of the unknown and unrelated child) and END as a compromise between that level of risk tolerance and competing factions with even higher levels of risk tolerance.

The resulting “acceptable” risk level codified in law, then, is only applicable to parents whose risk tolerance for their own children is higher than the “acceptable” level. The law doesn’t change their risk tolerance, rather, it adds risk to the undesired behavior (the risk of receiving a citation for not belting the kids in). No matter the consequences, however, there will always exist some parents (Brittney, Michael Jackson) whose risk tolerance for their own and known children is so high that the total risk will still not induce them to belt in the kids. In practice, then, the law also does not apply to the parents with the HIGHEST risk tolerance.

In other words, the law will ONLY affect the behavior of parents whose total risk tolerance is just higher than that which would lead them to belt in the kids in the absence of the law. Any cost-benefit analysis, then, can only include the benefit of those parents accomplishing the desired behavior and MUST include the total cost of education/enforcement as well as loss of liberty and the opportunity cost of other means of getting this particular subset of parents to belt in the kids.

I don’t think it would be hard to show that the same benefits could be realized through less-costly ways (public service announcements, for example) with NO attendant loss of liberty. I would go so far as to say GREATER benefits could easily be realized through private/private partnerships between auto manufacturers (driven by the desire for better highway safety ratings) and the Parents for Belting In The Kids Council (driven by the incessant need to nanny others). Given the possibility of equal or greater benefit through wholly nonrestrictive means, the law is merely an expedient, not an efficient or necessarily the most effective means.