From: ervan@cs.rice.edu (Ervan Darnell)
Subject: re: child labor and minimum wage
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 16:09:25 GMT

In a previous post, mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) wrote:
> Please produce a libertarian plan for meeting the needs of children that goes
> beyond "let their families and private charities fend for them."  No, wait.
> Let's see if you can identify any needs of children first.  For all I know,
> you expect them to be part of the workforce from birth, so that they can
> repay the loan they took out to finance their stay in the womb.

I took this to be a question about how (or why) children should be helped 
and not one about how taxpayers should be helped.

My response, in part, was:
] Parents do have a positive obligation
] toward their children to see to their basic necessities.  The problem
] is that people have children without being able to do that.  In this
] unique instance almost any person can create liability out of 'thin air'
] without first demonstrating some backing collateral.  The question
] then becomes, who suffers?  The choices are:
] 1) The children because of their bad luck.
] 2) The parents who might conceivably be forced to pay or prevented 
]    from having (more) children.
] 3) Totally uninvolved people who have their taxes hiked to pay for
]    someone else's children.
] 

mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) replied:
> 
> I more or less agree with this analysis.  However, there is still more to it.
> If the children suffer, and grow up to be adults who cannot compete within
> the preferred system, they compete out of the system, i.e. they commit crimes.
> 
> Where I think the libertarians are wrong, is that they are not pragmatic enough
> to recognize that while there is injustice to them in (3), there is also
> injustice to them through (1) when the children grow up and commit crimes.
> Frankly, I'd rather pay more taxes to create fellow citizens than to allow
> a resentful underclass to grow up looking for opportunities to rip me off.
> A class that isn't exploiting opportunities to expand itself at the expense
> of other classes is likely to shrink until it is impotent.

I think this answers a different question.  You, mrh, are defending 
welfare for children on the basis that it is good for the taxpayers 
as an investment to stop crime.  This does not impact on the 
original question of "meeting the needs of children".  Instead you 
are talking about meeting the needs of society.  You might contend 
that these come to the same thing in terms of policy but they are 
two different things in terms of reason why.

If you think that the purpose of welfare for children is an 
investment on the part of the taxpayers, you have implicitly agreed 
with part of the libertarian position, that forced charity is theft 
and instead some justification of it must be made for how it helps 
the taxpayer (like for defense(*)).  If you reject this, you are still 
left with answering the original question of why (3) instead of (1) 
or (2).

> You should pay as part of the community which has
> undertaken to solve the problem within itself.  At the moment, that is
> national, state, and local.  Not worldwide yet.

So, if the U.N. undertook to feed the world, should I, as a U.S. 
taxpayer whose government contributes, feel that my tax dollars are 
being wisely invested to keep the underclass in Africa from being a 
crime problem for me?  I'm not addressing the humanitarian issue 
here, I'm only saying that as an investment to stop crime, it would 
be a waste of money.  There might also be an argument that such 
intervention has strategic value (particularly in Somalia), but such 
an argument is outside of the framework that you are using for the 
general question of welfare for children.

For that matter, as a Houstonian, I do not feel that my federal tax 
dollars which go to AFDC in New York do much to lower the crime rate 
in Houston.  I am not even sure they do much to lower the crime rate 
in New York.

--------------------------------------
(*) Before someone complains that I don't understand 
libertarianism.  I mean by the example of defense something from 
which everyone benefits and there is no way to solve the free rider 
problem if everyone were allowed to contract for it individually.  
Certain types of roads might be another example of this.  I 
certainly do not mean to include the usual 'invest in society' type 
programs that liberals advocate.  I think they fail this test 
contrary to their supporters' claims.
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian