Last night Matt and I tuned into Fox for some light evening viewing; they’ve got a libertarian program now, ‘The Independents.’ It’s a round-table situation that appears to be aimed at the youngs. They were talking about the spate of highly publicized arrests of parents for what appear to be fairly innocuous parenting decisions, such as leaving a twelve-year-old in a car for a few minutes and so forth. You can probably predict what the tack they took was: government overreach/overreaction into private matters, etc. And that seems pretty sensible to me in this case.

So: open and shut, clear case of the libertarian position being the sensible one, right? Not so fast. It appears libertarian reasoning can also be used to justify the exact opposite approach to parenting. At least, this is the argument of the folks over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians: they’ve got a plan to hand the power to grant or deny families over to states. It’s a real stunner. The post outlining the plan popped up in 2011, but we’ve been promised an elaboration in the coming weeks, so sit tight.

The plan is a “parenting license.” It’s not very clearly delineated, but here is the gist:

“The state should require parents to be licensed. That is, there is no moral right to raise a child, and we would do well to think of it as a privilege that the state grants and can refrain from granting to certain individuals. If you don’t like that way of putting it, I am comfortable with a weaker claim: whatever moral right to raise a child there might be is defeated when the parent-to-be is significantly likely to cause the child substantial and avoidable harm, or, of course, if the parent does cause the child such harm. Those that should be refused a license to parent a child are those who are likely, in parenting, to harm the child.”

K. Yet how do we justify state intervention here, especially since it would require such enormous oversight and invasion of privacy? I mean theoretically you could have your kid taken for choosing to live off the grid and refusing to participate in the whole licensing regime; this is usually a nightmare to libertarians! The article goes on:

I should be clear: I am not proposing a licensing requirement for pregnancy. I am not sure I would oppose such, but a parental licensing program is not a licensing program for pregnancy. With a parental licensing program, if you get pregnant, you go to get a license to raise the child or you decide to give up the child. You violate no law by becoming pregnant. Once pregnant, you violate no law until the child is born—and only then if you decide to raise it without getting a license. And perhaps you are allowed to take the licensing test multiple times if you fail at first. Perhaps you do so after taking parenting classes.

It is still not clear to me how any of this fits into a libertarian framework. The thin, tenuous claim to libertarian reasoning is that since children can’t consent to be parented and libertarianism is all about consent, the state should come in and impose a licensing regime neither parent or child consents to in order to see to the child’s best interest. If the parent refuses to involve herself in the licensing regime, the child is taken away — without the child’s consent. The entire consent argument is thus a wash; the rest is built on anticipated harms, not actual harms. If the reasoning is that the state should intervene anywhere people might be harmed, one can easily justify just about any form of intervention; after all, poverty might harm, so it’s best to totally obviate those harms, right?

Suffice to say you probably wouldn’t get much agreement there. But how would a policy like this shake out? Would it even be effective? On one hand, you’re shrinking the pool of carers (licensing can only decrease, not increase the total number of carers) but keeping the pool of kids at a constant. If you’re going to use the current system we use to handle abused kids, then you’re going to be using the foster care system, which means increasing the burden of care on an already notoriously overtaxed and rough system. Likewise the licensing regime can only destroy but never create or secure marriages; in fact, a woman would be smart not to marry under such a regime, as her husband’s success couldn’t help her if she failed and won’t matter if she passes, but a husband’s failure would void a wife’s right to raise a child even if she did pass. Therefore a husband is only a terrible risk and never an aid when it comes to the risky matter of a woman getting to keep her baby.

The biggest harm here would be to the poor. People with the money and time to pay into the test-gaming cottage industry would game the test, and people without the money and time would fail the test. In fact, the policy already includes a vague ‘means test’ that is aimed at taking children from the poor. The policy alludes fuzzily to ‘parenting classes’; we all know poor people working long hours and/or multiple jobs don’t have time to take off to attend arbitrarily enforced classes. So the net result here, through the ruination of families and arbitrary hoops invented by the licensing regime, would be to take children away from poor moms. That’s the impact.

Incidentally, that’s what makes the policy libertarian. Every time I (or anyone, including Vatican officials) criticize libertarians, the response is that there’s really no such thing as a libertarian proper, that libertarians come in all stripes, that the target is too varied and too infinitely fractured to ever actually hit. There’s no way to correctly characterize them; you’re always going to be at least slightly wrong, leaving something out. A standard definition does not exist. Libertarians are like the sun, you can only really get an impression, never a solid, definitive look.

I don’t think they’re lying or dissembling when they say that. I think they’re telling God’s honest truth. There is no one policy attitude that is libertarian; as this Bleeding Heart Libertarians policy proposal demonstrates, ‘libertarian’ is not predictive in terms of policy. Instead, libertarians appear to be bound together by a collective id, a murky, almost indescribable set of commitments and impulses. It might be expressed in terms of an intense devotion to procedural voluntarism, but you won’t always see those in the policy advocacy. What you will always see is a willful disengagement from an obligation to others, an intense individualism that views increasingly less-like-me sets of people with increasing disdain. Usually this puts the poor on the receiving end of bad policy, which is unintentional only in the fashion of Zizek’s Nazi functionary who gets off a a little on the horrific evil wrought by his just-doing-my-job duties. “It’s not that I’m targeting the poor, it’s just that this policy happens to harm them most of all! But it obtains because procedural voluntarism/whatever/something/anything.”

This, I think, is why there has lately been an uptick in Catholic objection to libertarianism; it’s not that there are a set of policies out there that must everywhere and always be promoted by Catholics, but rather that there’s an id Catholics shouldn’t participate in, an orientation of loves, if you will, that is ill-suited to the calling of Christianity. This tracks well with what Pope Francis has been saying about the free marketeers all along, and as usual, I’m pretty sure he’s nailed it.