Even as the children say “I WANT TO GO HOME”, and the parents wholeheartedly concur, the mutual desire of each to be reunited is obstructed by for-your-own-good-arguments based on a reading of “generally undesirable culture” from a mainstream perspective. As Hall and Oates said, I can’t go for that.

And that part about a lack of educational choices is a laugh. Who has that out in the “real world”?

I’m a pluralist liberal / plumb-line libertarian. Someone who has influenced me a great deal here is political philosopher Chandran Kukathas.

Interestingly, here’s a rally staged by children of polygamists, supporting the legalization of their lifestyle and an end to harrasment by the state:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/20/ap/national/mainD8JK2O600.shtml

Oh, those poor brainwashed fools…

Almost every feature of these women’s lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they’re born, they can be reassigned at a moment’s notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade — by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they’re subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to “keep sweet.”

“Authoritarian” is simply a name. Conceivably millions of parents across the nation could be tagged with that. Unless there is evidence of physical abuse in the case of every parent, it’s simply illiberal and, well, AUTHORITARIAN to continue to detain these kids.

Maybe a more interesting question is, if you are a libertarian of some sort, what should be your attitude to authoritarian cults? If everyone who joined did so as an adult of their own free and rational will, that would be one thing, but how can children born and raised in such an environment be said to be exercising their natural rights?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080419/ap_on_re_us/polygamist_retreat

So, all 400+ kids will continue to be detained by the state, and undergo genetic tests. If this were some “in” group, there’d be widespread outrage. But because they are some reclusive wierdo Mormons, so be it.

This line is telling:

The state of Texas argued it should be allowed to keep the children because the sect’s teaching encourages girls younger than 18 to enter spiritual marriages with older men and produce as many children as possible. Its attorneys argued that the culture put all the girls at risk and potentially turned the boys into future predators.

Wow. Let’s pray an alien power with the ability to round up all non-Mormon American kids will not hold them indefinitely on grounds of a generally bad culture.

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/rights.html

Remember, the root of much of this dysfunction lies in the outlaw status of many of these communities. I’m thinking, of course, of polygyny, much in the news lately. Being pushed to the margin attracts people with marginal personalities, much as the drug war attracts assholes with nothing to lose and no cooperation enhancing behavior traits.

The argument for this usually pertains to public goods and free rider dilemmas. I don’t think the issue discussed here falls into that category.

This argument has always been rather fallacious, because the government is only made up of individuals who strongly enough believe in the immorality of this or that pet grievance. Quite evidently there are forces wishing to direct the rescue of children, in or out of government.

The rest of your post is your ideology.

That’s a bit harsh / unfairly dismissive. I don’t deny the ideology on some level, but I think you overstate mine while failing to recognize your own.

I don’t know how many times I’m going have to say this on this blog, but I’m just not that big a fan of the rhetorical device “if you care so much about X, go do it yourself.”

The fact that you see this as merely a rhetorical device speaks volumes.

Perhaps, however, I should clarify what my intention is in making such a statement. It’s not to say, “Oh, Angelica doesn’t have the strength of her own convictions - otherwise, she’d be working day and night to advance her agenda directly.” That is not what I mean.

Rather, what I’m saying is that, when you put a policy in terms of actual human beings - not unlike yourself - doing the tasks that you’re prescribing, it can give one a different view of the policy. It’s easy to talk about some abstract entity, full of well paid and legally entitled civil servants, accomplishing some institutionally defined goal. It’s another thing to talk about what it means for one human being to come and take another human being’s child. My goal is not to make you a hypocrite; it’s to show you the another, equally real side of what you’re proposing.

The whole reason I think we need the government is to do stuff that is inappropriate/unrealistic/ineffective for people to do as individuals.

Fair enough. I’m not so oblivious as to get into an argument about libertarianism / anarchism at this point; you’re clearly annoyed.

The rest of your post is your ideology. I’m not saying your ideology is wrong, just that you have simply restated your core beliefs without engaging with the case at hand.

Here’s a better argument, a la Keith’s suggestion: if you think another community is so dysfunctional that it can’t be tolerated, then I’d suggest that you go and talk to them / sieze their children / kill them / whatever. I think it’s highly dangerous to pay a third party institution, which by its very nature will approach things from a bureaucratic and mechanistic perspective, to do so.

Another thing to keep in mind is that cultural changes in communities happen slowly, but they then take root and last. Changes from the top down, implemented by the state, occur quickly but can be very unstable and fleeting, with unintended consequences. There’s a lot of utility to neighbors discussing a pressing issue among themselves - contrast that with a national media that frames an issue and then shows only two sides to it for some period of time until the rulers have made up their mind.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/15/sect.mothers/?iref=hpmostpop

Here’s an article relevant to this thread of discussion

My answer to your question is no. I then told you what the cabin boy was.

No, the real cabin boy is the small unit then obtaining, from individuals through families and villages up to at most princely states. For instance, the French had already hegemonised pretty much all Bengal with the help of native allies when the British stopped them at Plassey; either way, the local peasantry was being “eaten”.

Am I to understand that the nation of India is the cabin boy?

It’s all very well to say that the atomization of society is bad for civil society. But inevitably you have to acknowledge it is what individuals and individual families have chosen.

Kevin already articulated the meat of my primary response to that. It’s not chosen. And I think what liberals sometimes misunderstand about libertarians is that our primary interest is for a life that *is* chosen. This can only begin to happen when “family values” is taken off the presidential talking points, first of all. Real stability comes from below, not above.

The proposed goal is a society where the economics, the politics, the values, the culture, etc. all conform as closely as possible to the individual resident’s. I can wax nostalgic about traditional social organizations, but that’s not really what I want to do. What I really want is to see if my ideas - or your ideas - have real world utility; if they make us happier or less happy, and in what ways. I want to see massive social experimentation in the area of organization, so that revolutions and political manuervering aren’t necessary to live in a world that has your own values in which you are maximally invested.

I want all of us to be right, not by winning or losing an argument, but by realizing in the material world those ideas and values we hold. I suspect many traditional forms of organization were the result of successful experiments, but I’m sure we can do better in many areas with our current consciousness and information.

Well, sorry, but if someone had said “American Prick” I wouldn’t have been offended.

“The logic of empire requires moving into power vacuums or someone else will, and leads to moving forward so as not to move backward. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

That’s the imperialists’ problem, not the people of India, Kenya, et al. Just as I have no right to kidnap you to prevent my own beating. (Besides, the rationale for empire is scarcely so clear cut as that, typically involving many more variables and far more speculation as to potential danger, and to whom.)

“I need hardly add, while current US imperialism is following these ingrained habits and patterns, it has no such lesser evil, heading off others justification.”

I’m with you here. But again, the US interest in identifying some other rival power to fend off means next to nothting to someone suffering under the yoke of AMERICAN imperialism.

If somebody abducts me and tells me “If I don’t abduct you, I’ll be in danger, and besides, you’d rather have me than THEM!”, I’d throw my lot in with my own survival and decision making skills, thank you very much.

It was usually the French, but insert Russians, Germans, Afghans, Turks, slavers, whoever, as needed. The thing is, British imperialism developed out of the experience of empire and was not a driver of it until the very end (roughly speaking, the Boer War), but the original driver was a response to the aggression of yet other outside parties. Their own imperialism, if European, had similarly developed as a response, but to events in Europe. For instance, French attitudes had developed in response to earlier English and later Spanish attacks, while the Spanish approach flowed on naturally from the Reconquista.

The logic of empire requires moving into power vacuums or someone else will, and leads to moving forward so as not to move backward. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

I need hardly add, while current US imperialism is following these ingrained habits and patterns, it has no such lesser evil, heading off others justification.

Given my radically permissive views this may sound strange, but you first need to establish that there’s something wrong with maximal pro life position before you can consider it a drawback!

I did say it was a potential drawback. Oddly, when you make a secular argument for the pro-life position, the argument is surprisingly formidable. However, locking people up for killing tiny cell clusters also strikes me as evil. Both of the consistent views on abortion seem to lead to ethical conclusions that are unpalatable.

The question is whether the government or the parents have authority [over the child].

I think it is edge conditions like these that explain the persistence of government as an institution. There are cases where our moral sense drives us to override the will of others (in this case the child’s parents) based on a belief that we know better than the parents do how to raise their child.

My approval is irrelevant to the parents and deciding to intervene for the greater good there seems somewhat analogous to foreign intervention.

Only if you consider the state to be a “parent” and it’s citizens to be its “children.” That’s a major flaw in arguments for toppling tyranny abroad — the abused “children” aren’t actually children. The oppressed citizens of a tyrant need to actually ask for help and the liberator properly should have a means of liberating them that doesn’t kill a whole bunch of the oppressed in the process.

“One could easily argue that adults never really understand the issue. A lot of malnourished adults in third world countries have the mental ages of people we might consider ‘children’ here (though they would have been considered adults long ago and if anything are physically maturing faster due to modern diets).”

(I know this isn’t your argument.) This reminds me of something I read by C.L.R. James on the colonialists’ excuse for not allowing national indigenous liberation: illiteracy. If they can’t read, how can they make meaningful decisions about the direction of their society? He pointed out that they use symbols and spoken language to communicate, etc., but above all: WHY IS IT ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS, YOU BRITISH PRICK?

“It’s good to know that you’re allowing the parents some recourse beyond a counter-kidnapping.

So you are not completely opposed to someone having authority over “family matters” after all.”

Well, if we want to get technical about it, I suppose we could argue that such a situation would be an inter-familial rather than intra-familial dispute.

“As long as that person is not a specialist in doing so. But in a society of our scale, not having specialists for doing things such as making sure at-risk children are OK is absolutely nonsense. ”

I guess you have a lot more confidence in alleged specialists than I do.

“But that would be such a momentious change in our way of life that it is surely putting the cart before the horse to talk about dismantling the department of social services before that change happens.”

Shock therapy may well have its place in some instances.

M. Claxton,

I second Kevin. Great post.

Quasibill,

“And I agree with Keith that many of the neo-liberal state directed systems are likely to collapse in the relatively near future - but I’m less optimistic about that process, as I can easily see it resulting in centralized fascism, akin to the fall of the Weimar Republic.”

You may be crediting me with more optimism than I actually possess. The US at present may well be at the Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon phase. It appears that the final nails in the coffin of the old republic are being driven and that executive dictatorship is on the horizon. I don’t think it will have the flash and style of National Socialism and it will occur incrementally enough that no one really notices all that much. It’s already been going on for several decades anyway.

To me, the implication is that people tend to form close communities, in the absence of other interventions (such communities not *necessarily* being an outgrowth of a pre-existing family organization). And these close communities tend to provide all the wonderful social services that liberals claim they’re in favor of, in a voluntary, caring manner. I’ve never claimed that these communities have to be organized along the lines of traditional ‘tribes’. In fact, I think there is more recent and relevant historical example of this organization to be found in colonial New England.

The small community idea also has implications with respect to why those ungrateful Ay-rabs don’t fall down on their knees and pray to the altar of American capitalism - they see the atomization of our society and don’t want it. In fact, if you read what many of the non-radical muslim clerics have to say, they’ll say *exactly* that: that American culture is debased by it’s atomization, not by its ‘freedom’.

Finally, I agree with Kevin that saying the current state of atomization has anything to do with individual preferences requires ideological blinders or plain ignorance. State policies have encouraged this for over 100 years. And one need only read Orwell’s 1984 to get an understanding of why a state would follow such a policy. And I agree with Keith that many of the neo-liberal state directed systems are likely to collapse in the relatively near future - but I’m less optimistic about that process, as I can easily see it resulting in centralized fascism, akin to the fall of the Weimar Republic.

So by all means, dance across the eight lane superhighway, but if you throw your minor children under the semi and claim their deaths were God’s will, you still killed ‘em. I think we can leave religion out and focus purely on the notion of whether others can and should intervene.

I’d agree with several of the libertarians above that an outside party can intervene, preferably after presenting some kind of evidence to an impartial judge or community jury. So I really don’t think that the process would be massively different from what it is today, except the non-state child protection organizations would doubtless be more diffuse than the state-run ones. In some ways that would be good, in some ways bad.

Here’s a thought for this discussion: any system that involves child welfare and neglectful or abusive parenting is going to be fucked up. It doesn’t matter what the system is, it doesn’t matter if it’s run by an evil dictatorship, a wondrous and happy social democracy, an anarchist federation of the tribal elders. It’s going to make mistakes on a pretty regular basis, and those mistakes are going to have pretty horrific consequences from time to time. A few years back I sat through a trial in which it was pretty clear that a young, unprepared and drug abusing father had beaten his daughter to death. When we first reported on the story, we had her age as two. It turned out later that he had apparently killed her about a week before her second birthday, buried her body in the back yard, and then tried to pretend that she’d gone back to live with her mother.

Before her murder, she’d come into the emergency room with serious bruises and signs of neglect, just a few weeks earlier. The local child protection agency was notified. Because this all took place on a Canadian First Nations Reserve, it was a native-run agency.

First Nations people in Canada are extremely reluctant to take a child away, because between 1880 and as late as 1970, tens of thousands of them were scooped up by Indian Agents and hauled away to church-run residential schools, where they were beaten for speaking native languages and regularly raped by pedophilic priests and teachers.

Which is a long way of saying that each abuse, in one direction or another, tends to push the pendulum a little to hard in the other direction.

Whether to have a society dominated by giant corporations and other large organizations has never been put forward as a meaningful choice on a ballot, that I’m aware of. The basic structural changes that led to this transformation were made by political and economic elites almost totally insulated from meaningful democratic control, and those structural changes were never subject to public deliberation in the democratic process. They’re the kinds of issues that almost never show up on the radar of the press or of political debate, because the dominant establishments in “both sides” agree on them. And then the public is enculturated to view that structure as “normal” and “inevitable,” and to dismiss as “extremism” any attempt to challenge it.

It’s all very well to say that the atomization of society is bad for civil society. But inevitably you have to acknowledge it is what individuals and individual families have chosen. Wax nostalgic over homo-sapien’s tribal days all you like. I suspect life is a lot less free for people with such strong family/societal bonds even if they are free from the state.