Replies

You have to be careful with THAT line of thought as well.

Well duh. It just happens to be true. My wife works in a newborn intensive care unit. She sees the consequences of drug abuse on babies every day. It is a real and life long consequence of drug abuse and it is horribly expensive. Who pays when the parents are incapable?

As far as I am concerned, bearing a child while abusing drugs should be considered a crime against another person. Given the problem of intrusion into the family, how to deal with it sounds to me like precisely a problem for federalism, the laboratory of republican government.

If you say that, ultimately, it is the states’ purview to determine and protect the welfare of children,

Look, I've wrestled seriously with every one of these problems for two decades. I've written two books and numerous well regarded articles dealing with the history and hazard of UN treaties. Try this one as an example. I've even spoken at a couple of Henry Lamb's Freedom21 conferences. You don't have to preach this "who owns the child" crap to me.

The question is: when the parent is legally found to be criminally irresponsible to a another person, who then assumes responsibility for the kid? Someone must. The problems for the kid are real and life long. Libertarians, tending to be young, tend to discount them to their own political peril in a fashion directly analogous to the political problem for social conservatives cited by Mr. Paul.

As a society, we do have to work out just means to deal with problems perpetrated by individuals. In the case of drug moms, I prefer adjudicated forced adoption and private charity for the kid to an agency like CPS, with work camp for the rest of the mother's life (effectively slavery), don't you? Deprive someone else of health or liberty for their whole life and you will surrender yours, an eye for an eye, and then some.

If the State’s determination of “best” is in conflict with the parents’, who gets to say?

If you don't have any idea of what is "best," offer a rhetorical question instead of proposing an answer, which is exactly to my point. There are MANY problems in society that do not lend themselves well to any form of government because enforcing solutions to those problems with police power IS the slippery slope. Yet the consequences of individual acts MUST be managed by someone because the owners' irresponsibility does inflict a public cost. Whether the venue is traffic accidents with death or disabling injury to innocents or drug kids, these costs still have to be managed by someone other than the victim. Churches used to deal with that cost, to which secular

libertarians would scream (which is why Marxism is pointedly atheist). Then what? How innovations are tested is why truly federal systems are so effective. Putting as much accountability on the perp as they can bear productively while doing as much as we can to have remedial action remain private is probably the best we can do. Use any drug you want, but if you damage or destroy the life and/or property of someone else, you will surely pay, big time.