Paint CHiPs
Viva Le Me
Registered: Jul 2000
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quote:
Originally posted by Talarohk
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and hypothesize the libertarian response.
[libertarian]
You're getting ahead of yourself. You can take a Libertarian position without involving the kids at all.
The circumstances of this case don't mean a damn thing. This could be any set of circumstances to any sort of case possible. The bottom line is thus: Does the government have the authority to determine how many kids a citizen is allowed to have?
Doesn't matter if that citizen is a murderer, a child molester, a wealthy or poor person. If the answer is "yes" or "no" in any specific instance, than it must be "yes" in all cases.
Nothing else matters but that. Take it a step further: Do we have the right, under the constitution, to have as many kids as we want, or is that right conditional? If you decide that it is conditional for this one person, than you have to accept that it becomes conditional for all. There are no "yeah, buts" when it comes to rights like this. It's all or none. If the government has the authority to decide this for one person, they have the authority to decide it for all. Simple as that.
The tendency is to want to control these things because of what they LEAD to. But, in the Libertarian view, you make illegal the undesirable conclusion, not the conditions that may or MAY NOT lead up to it, in this case not paying child support. Not paying child support is illegal, and that's the harm here, so what further steps needs to be taken? If this guy has another kid and still doesn't pay child support, put him in jail. It's not the act of having children in and of itself that is bad here. It's the subsequent action on the part of the person. I have a problem with the government making illegal any action that is not in itself harmful, on the grounds that it MAY LEAD to harmful things. Mostly because that sort of legalistic thinking is infinitly regressive. The next logical step is to make it illegal for anybody in debt to have children. Or for people in debt to have children out of wedlock. And so on and so on.
All we ultimately want to stop is people not paying child support. So, if that's your worry, increase the penalties for that, make greater the enforcement, apply the law better, but unless all those measures completely fail, there's no reason to open the umbrella and start legislating all periphery issues because there's a chance they might lead to more of the final behavior. I have a very simple solution. Throw the guy in jail for not paying child support. Guess what, he can't have more children in jail, AND he gets the additional penalty (punative action) for the real crime, which is NOT having children, but not SUPPORTING children. Problem solved.
The judge in this case would likely reply "well, our laws make it so we can't put him in jail yet, so to bolster our shitty enforcement of poorly written laws that don't have any teeth, we need to add lots more shittily enforced poorly written laws that don't have any teeth. The idea being, if you have ENOUGH crappy laws, one of them might work.
I don't buy that line of thinking. I think that our legal system would be a lot better served in not passing ANY new laws, to just put the time and energy into making sure that the laws we DO have WORK. To me, it's like finding a stain on your carpet and deciding to pour more shit on it to cover the stain up. Then, because you've created an even bigger mess, you decide you need to dump MORE shit on top of it to cover THAT mess, and so on.
There's very little excuse, in my opinion, for that mindset. If the law isn't serving the need, fix the law, don't just keep adding more laws.
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05-15-2004 07:50 PM
