From the Libertarian platform:
We call for an end to the practice in many states of jailing children not accused of any crime. We call for repeal of all "children's codes" or statutes which abridge due process protections for young people.
Because you omitted the first sentence above are we to assume that you are in favor of jailing children not accused of a crime?
About the second sentence: That implies that under the current government young people are having their due process protections abridged. That sure sounds like young people are not being given Fourth Amendment protection. And that the Libertarian platform seeks to return full protection to the young people.
You are either incompetent, ignorant, or intended to deceive the reader. The choice is yours.
468 posted on 12/31/01 1:25 AM Pacific by Zon
A ten year runaway shouldn't be held until his or her parents or guardians are located? Libertarianism is a cartoon philosophy.
Any shelter worker, or, for that matter, anyone who thinks about it for 30 seconds, will tell you that the chances are in the 99+ percentile that a 10 year old that isn't desperate to volunteer to be "held" until his or her parents can be located is a 10 year old that's being sexually, emotionally and/or physically abused by someone in his family with legal impunity--an all too common state of affairs. A child that wants emancipation usually has a damn good reason. The world is a scary place for a 10 year old without parents.
I won't take responsibility for the current libertarian platform as anyone that actually wants to run for office is going to be an evil lunkhead (the reason we have a Bill of Rights), but I can tell you where most libertarian theorists come down on the question of children's rights: namely, that they don't have many. Children are not competent to bear the rights and responsibilities of full adults, and so not members of the laissez-faire community. A toddler is not capable of understanding the moral restraint that should prevent you from murdering those you are angry with--a 6 year old is not capable of driving. To be in the moral community, you have to be able to exercise moral judgement. We do not grant rights to rocks or chickens because they are not capable of moral judgement. The same goes for younger children, and we cede them rights in a complicated and somewhat arbitrary manner as they age. None of this is particularly a central libertarian problem. Like riparian rights, or right-of-way cedings, or which side of the road to drive on, this is a question libertarians should leave to current traditions in the law, as they have no basis in theory for addressing them. Libertarians are interested in the restriction of coercion and fraud in human affairs, between citizens, and as committed against citizens. Children are not citizens, they are something else. Some of them become citizens eventually. In the mean time, they have a few slowly growing citizen-like rights, are partly the responsibility and property of their parents, tempered by the responsibility of the State to step in occasionally, on the question of who their parents really are, and whether their parents are doing them coercive harm. None of this substantially disregards libertarian theory which, as I said, applies to citizens.