So much for this not being about the %$$#^ asphalt.  !  

"Reply By: Andrew J. Brehm Posted: Thursday, September 27, 2007 "

Me: People who chose to have children they cannot afford have no right to them. They should have the right to sell their original rights on the market. All the problems would be solved in one fell sweep.

"What "original rights" would they have if they have "no right" to them? '

Their original rights derive from the fact that they made the consider investment necessary to create and bear the child to term. However, the child being a human being in itself, he or she has the right to negotiate or to have someone else more knowledgeable - in the case of a young minor or baby - negotiate on his or her behalf for a better deal, as in sufficient food and medical care, etc. with new foster parents or guardians. This still leaves the original parents having made a considerable investment, so, unless they are unwilling or unable to negotiate on their own, they still have the primary option to make that negotiation, i.e., finding someone else to take over the right to raise the child in return for reimbursement for their time and trouble.

"Also, you are ignoring the children's rights. They have a right not to be sold like property."

You make that assumption, but I never said that. See above. There are separate sets of rights involved, child and parent and the rest of society. Unless there is some impediment, the parents who realized that they could not pay for food or perhaps expensive special medical care for a child with special needs, could sell their rights - NOT to ownership of the child (the child owns himself, BTW) - but to ownership of the rights to bring up the child.

"I'm not sure parents have a "right" to their children. I think it is rather a duty."

As I started out saying, life is a gift. The parents already invested quite a lot in bringing the child into existence. They don't owe the child anything, altho if they simply abandoned a child, I would feel that they should be castigated and socially ostracized for their failure to place a morally proper value upon the life of another individual. In any normal society, people are the most valuable assets of that society. The problem is how to make the $200,000+ investment in properly raising a child in such a way that reflects the rights and values of all concerned, such that the child realizes that potential value.

As I briefly mentioned, one way would be for parents to set up shareholding trusts for their children at birth. The trust would serve as a financial vehicle for people outside the parents to make investments in a child's education, etc., in the hopes of making a profit on the share value when the child reached the point of becoming productive.

Of course, you could not force the trust on the child. The child could reject it completely at legal maturity. However, doing so would likely wipe out a major asset by which he could get loans for college or to start a farm or business. Modeled in a way after the highly successful Grameen Bank microloans system, such a system could easilly cross international boundaries to allow mass investment from 1st world to 2nd and 3rd world kids anywhere.

parents from the beginning of the world have been responsible for the children

I think the whole point of this article (aside from handing out another good, hearty liberal bashing of course) is to suggest they aren't always and that when they aren't to question whether the rest of us should be.

i think that the whole point of this article is who is going to pay for the child. thus who will raise the child. the parent or the state. even a bad parent is better than the state. and i don't mean evil parents but just parents that are bad at the job.

Well then you're wrong. Paying for a childs welfare is not the same as raising a child. You only have to look at child welfare payments to recognize that. Just because their parents receive money from the taxpayer doesn't mean the taxpayer is raising their kids.



No not in this case because the subject as you said is "payment". A bad parent in this case doesn't pay. From the childs that's not better than the state paying instead.

who ever pays controls.

Wow. Finally a liberal who's not afraid to state that they believe being on a limited income amounts to a character defect.

At least you're honest.

remember Mr. green the man who was arrested for polygamy.


he wasn't found guilty of that. nor were charges filed for it.


he was found guilty for needing to put his 20 some kids on Medicare and food stamps.


oh and statutory raping his first wife in Mexico. where it wasn't rape.

I agree with Draginol. I shouldn't have to pay for kids education either , and people without cars shouldn't have to pay for roads, and pacificists shouldn't have to pay for war, etc. Lets all reduce our contribution to this society down to the exact amount that we get to take from it. In other words each to his own.

You had a good argument going until you got to the car argument.

Government exists to do the things for society that are impractical for people to do for themselves.  Providing national defense, building roads both most definitely falls into that category.

As for schools, I'd say that that falls into that same area as well but I supsect that a larger % of conservatives would favor both private roads and private schools.

Yes but I still end up paying for the roads other people choose to use. Once my roads and portions of the highways I use have been paid for how come I have to keep paying for all those other roads that I dont use? I dont choose to drive down those roads why should i pay for them? Those are other peoples choices not mine. Remember my objection is in "having [my] earnings syphoned off to be given to someone who has " chosen to drive these other roads. Why in the hell should I have to pay for them?

Let's break this down to its component parts:

People cannot, as a practical matter, build their own roads.  They cannot even pay someone on their own to build a road.  By contrast, people can and do pay for their own health insurance.

Me paying for your health insurance is not the same thing as me contributing towards a commonly used resource.  By your rationale, we should have the government provide housing, food, and everything else.  There is nothing, nothing at all, that the government shouldn't provide based on your line of reasoning.

To me, the cut off point of what government should provide is what someone can reasonably do for themselves.

schools do fall into this area. problem is the people in charge the teachers union is pushing an agenda on the kids.

if we thought as the democrats want us to think and as most everyone else in the world. we would let the government do everything. and the flight that went down on 9/11 would have hit its intended target.

The cutoff isn't reasonableness of doing so oneself. The cutoff is when paying extra gives me no benefit. IE, the government pays for your health insurance, so I pay more. Do I get health insurance from that? Does the benefit of the lower premium outweigh the extra taxes I'm paying? If not, then it shouldn't be done. Building roads, lighthouses, parks, etc. is what the government is there for. It's not there to pay for personal things.

Wow. Finally a liberal who's not afraid to state that they believe being on a limited income amounts to a character defect.

Except thats not what I said.

People cannot, as a practical matter, build their own roads. They cannot even pay someone on their own to build a road. By contrast, people can and do pay for their own health insurance.

You're mixing services with infrastructure to make your point. Building a hospital is not something individuals can practically afford either. This is paid for individually through healthcare. Driving on a road is a service that can and is charged for and is therotically divisible down into individual benefit vrs cost.

You say individuals should pay for their own healthcare. I agree. But I also think its inconsistent to say servicex (healthcare) should be individually paid for but not service y (roading, etc). Why should a neighbourhood of people who only drive about their local area continue paying for "other" roads once the roads they drive on have been paid for by the taxes they have incurred to pay for them? In other words the roads they "directly" use have been paid for by them via taxation why should they any pay more?

Well the obvious answer to that is the indirect benefits they get from having those other roads in place. In the grand scheme of things its actually better that they keep paying for "other" peoples roads because having those roads in place accrues unto them additional indirect benefits beyond them merely being able to drive their cars along them. So it doesn't matter that they dont drive those other roads themselves, they are stll better off continuing to pay because overall its just works better.

The same is true for healthcare. Who should pay for the kids.... the parents. But we know that not all parents can, so the question becomes should we? Whats the argument for us continuing to pay for someone elses kids to have healthcare. The answer is the indirect benefits that acrrue unto to us from living in a happy healthy society. Thats why we should be paying for other peoples kids to have healthcare.

So to me thats that issue.

But then you go a step further and use this pregnant boof and her half baked ideas of entitlement to swipe "liberals" and suggest that this is a condition endemic to them and them only. Which is bullshit. Now you're just politiking. The Iraq War being a perfect example. The Iraq War is overwhelming a conservative war. It's overwhelmingly conservatives that promote and push it and its overwhelming conservatives that want US to stay on. Yet I bet theres not one conservative who personally believes that we should have gone and should stay on that will personally contract themselves along with their conservative friends to pay for it. No for that they expect that liberal taxation will largely
subsidize their war.

So to suggest that "Conservatives object to paying for other people's personal decisions. " is probably true. But to suggest that this is because conservatives always pay for themselves is completely false. And so to call some dropkick out in Vermont and to say this is a typical liberal "Pro choice, zero responsibility" position is to ignore a whole host of contridictions in the conservative position such as "We want war and you to pay".

Conservatives are no better in this regard that liberals which is why these kinds of articles (admittedly from both camps) amount to little more than good old fashioned partisanship. They make a minor bang, they get people talking (and yelling) but ultimately theres nothing to their claims.

There is always a slippery slope argument to be made.

But there is little argument that things like national defense (Iraq war) should be handled by the government because the constitution explicitly mentions it. Providing a common defense is the first job of a government.

Similarly, creating a shared resource (police, roads, schools) is something that tends to fall to governments.

Hospitals, by contrast, are NOT owned by the government. Doctors are not government employees. 

Our government does not transfer other people's property to the poor so that they can pay a private road builder or private security firm. 

That is why I don't think your analogy fits.

As for taking swipes at liberals, it is unavoidable because the American left is the side that equates belief in a policy to moral superiority.  It is a pecularity of American liberalism -- they think they are more compassionate because they favor people like me paying for other people why they themselves overwhelmingly barely take care of themselves.

There has been a great deal of research over the years showing that the bulk of the taxes are paid for by conservatives for programs favored by liberals.  It is pretty easy to be compassionate when it's other people's money that they're being compassionate with.

Free health care is not a right. I grew up without health insurance.  I find it increasingly sickening that our society now finds it intolerable to even pay for their own doctor visits. Why stop there? Government provided oil changes for the car, government provided hair cuts, government provided auto insurance.  It's a never ending line that takes us to tyranny.