Who Owns the Children?

     MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry kicked a hornet's nest
with the following comments:
"We have never invested as much in public education as we
should have, because we always had kind of a private notion of
children.  Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.  We
haven't had a very collective notion of 'These are our children.'  
So part of it is, we have to break through our kind of private
idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their
families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
Once it's everybody's responsibility, and not just the household's,
then we start making better investments."

     I only have space to cover one of the absurdities included
in that statement.  Perhaps Harris-Perry recently crawled out
from under a rock.  Maybe she spent the last 150 years snoozing
with Rip van Winkle.  Apparently she missed out on the trend of
frowning upon owning humans.

     Ownership means control.  To own is to control.  The
person who owns you has the right to control you.  As far back
as John Lock, civilized people recognized that only one form of
owning humans is consistent with liberty and dignity.  That is
self ownership.

     Any free person owns himself.  To be owned by another
would be bondage, sometimes called slavery.  Only under self
ownership are individuals free.  The individual controls himself. 
To achieve liberty each self owned individual must respect the
self ownership of all other individuals.

     In other words, for liberty to prevail everyone must
refrain from aggression against all others.  No one may say to
another peaceful person, "Do it my way, or I will hurt you."  To
live in liberty such threats must be reserved for use only against
those who commit aggression.

     When John Lock stated "All men are created equal" he
made it clear that he meant all men were created with the equal
liberty of self ownership.  The drafters of the Declaration of
Independence relied heavily on the writings of John Lock.  Thus,
it is reasonable to assume that to them "all men are created
equal" also meant that all men were created with the equal
liberty of self ownership.

     Obviously children are incapable of full self control. 
Does this mean that they must be someone's slaves?  Are
children's only options to be owned by their parents, or owned
by the community?

     Under liberty no one can own the children.  Parents are
the natural guardians of their children.  It is the parents' duties as
guardians to protect the interests of their children.  When parents
fail, sometimes other adults intervene to provide other guardians
for the children.  Neither the parents nor the replacement
guardians own the children.

     It would be possible to strip guardianship from parents
and grant it to the community.  How would the community
exercise its power of guardianship?

     It is ridiculous to even suggest that the entire community
would participate in the guardianship.  If they did, the results
would be disaster for the children.  The children would be ruled
by the whims of a giant committee.

     In the real world a few individuals would take over. 
Children would still be controlled by a few individuals.  Would
the children be better off being controlled by strangers rather
than by parents?  This question has already been asked and
answered, in a slightly different form.  Are children better off
being raised in an orphanage than by their parents?  The answer
to this question is yes, only if the children have very
incompetent parents.

     Parents understand their children better, and care more
about them, than do the rest of the community.  The community
can assist parents.  The final decisions of guardianship must be
left to the  parents.  To do otherwise is the formula for disaster. 
Subject to guardianship, the children own themselves.  Hopefully
Ms. Harris-Perry will crawl back under her rock, take her advice
with her, and stay there for at least another 150 years.

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Copyright 2013
Albert D. McCallum