Yes, CPS needs to be there for the child that is at risk, or is in danger. BUT, CPS should not be redefining the definitions of risk, danger, and abuse to cover normal parenting decisions. Such as walking to school, taking care of a younger sibling, playing in the park, biking the town and so on.

Parents that have confidence in their children, should not have to fear CPS. Too much power, in the hands of people, that are allowed to use their own judgement.

Once had CAS, Canada`s version of CPS, show up. My wife`s ex called, because his bio-daughter had told him the dog sleeps with her. He didn`t like that, and this caseworker wanted to open an investigation into the hygeine of the home. CAS thought I would just allow this. I am not a hoop jumper, and informed the lady, `I understand you have a job to do. But it is her dog, her bed, and her choice. No one else`s. If you do not like that, by all means start your investigation. Mind you, you will not be granted access to our home, without a warrant, and a police officer to serve it, and witness your activity in my home.` Never heard another word from them.

As for the great success you tout, I’d like to know the ratio of truly bad people to people who just got nailed with a bureaucratic system.

Many of these assaults occur during childhood. The rise of CPS and other bureaucracies aimed at preventing abuse also resulted from a culture of willful ignorance regarding domestic violence that persists to this day. The bureaucrat who interrogated Mohammed Chang and his sister? She probably knew that this wasn’t a case of abuse. And you know what? Her job probably insisted that she could not exercise her own personal judgment on the matter until she’d interviewed them, for three reasons:

1. As Weber stipulates, bureaucracies aim to be machinelike, and to minimize the unsupervised exercise of personal judgment by their employees, to ensure predictable, uniform results. This is a *feature*, not a bug.

2. Abusers are crafty, and have power over their victims. They can and do make things look innocent.

3. As stated, there was (and sadly still is) a culture of looking the other way. People have natural inhibitions in this culture against interfering in others’ “private business”, even when such interference is entirely necessary and justified. Requiring the bureaucrat to conduct the interviews whenever a specific set of circumstances are met, regardless of his/her personal judgment, helps to counteract that culture.

Again, as Radley has unceasingly pointed out, this system can be and has been abused by overeager prosecutors, vengeful ex-spouses, fame-seekers, ambulance chasers, and fabulists of all stripes. But it exists to counter a very, very real problem, and has had great (though still inadequate) success in doing so.

Signed,
A conservative, not a libertarian

My sister and I both came into the hospital in full outdoor winter garb, having come straight from the sledding hill. It should have been obvious my father was telling the truth, but the woman from child services wasn’t going to let that get in the way of interrogating two school children (for our own benefit, of course).

The local news covered these two girls’ death, but they didn’t run a story on the utter joy I had playing down on those tracks, experiencing true freedom…danger and all.

In the 80s, stranger-danger and molestation fear campaigns meant that I had a code word (“Snaussages!”) to prevent me from walking off with someone not authorized and a current picture filed with the local school district (I’m not really sure what that was supposed to do). I also had the freedom to play at the park across the street by myself or with friends at the age of 5 (*Gasp!*), ride my bike to a friend’s house roughly a mile away at 6 or 7 and play in the woods at the end of my block to my heart’s content (until they found a couple of dead homeless people in those woods… I had to find somewhere else to play for a while).

In the 90s, gang violence pushed juvenile homicide rates to the highest we’ve seen. Still, my track record as a responsible child earned me the ability to hop on the bus and go downtown (Seattle) just about every weekend. Did bad things happen? Of course. But they were bad things I survived. More importantly, they were bad things I may not have survived if I didn’t have the judgment my previous freedom allowed me to develop (the lack of unsupervised play is having a quantifiable negative affect on executive function in American children, according to research).

However, as has been mentioned, helicopter parenting had already taken hold during my youth. Especially on my block, it seemed. The two other families with children my age kept their kids on an insanely short leash. Now that I’ve got a little one of my own, I need only look back at their “transition” to adulthood to remind me of my allegiance to free-range parenting. These kids hit 18 like it was a brick wall. Unfamiliar with freedom prior to legal adulthood, they had no idea what to do with it. Dropping out of school, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancies and a number of other unfortunate choices were made right out of the gate. Two young ladies remain lost to this day. Another took a decade to pull out of her self-destructive spiral. These were good kids from solidly middle-class homes, and I can’t help but believe that the way they were stifled as children created the adults they have become.

The fact that so many parents today are unwilling to afford their children the freedom they enjoyed as kids breaks my heart. Not just for the joy and adventure these kids will be missing in the near future, but for the disastrous effect it will have on the adults they turn into.

The notion that the American government is a limited government is a myth. Back in 1824, the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons v Ogden that the powers in the Constitution were to be given the broadest possible interpretation, which effectively nullified the limits the Founders intended. The result is the Leviathan of today. Nothing short of reversing that decision and abandoning its descendents will fix this fundamental flaw in American government.

In theory, the public could undo the damage….but the pulic is too busy sucking at the government teat to want to.

I remember, back when I was a little kid dying of boredom in a public elementary school, one of my teachers muttering on about the superiority of ancient China as a social system. She said everything there was “based on qualifications”, unlike America where “lucky fools get rich selling pet rocks and Rubik’s cubes.”

Years later, while reading some book on public choice which gave me my first acquaintance with the concept of rent-seeking, the memory came rushing back and I thought: “So that’s what you had in mind, you nasty, tenured old bitch!”

Nothing else will suffice, and certainly not real knowledge. In my line of work, I am involved in accreditation, and accrediting agencies care nothing about what an academic official actually does and certainly not how effectively he or she teaches. Instead, qualifications depend solely upon the academic degree, a number of formal hours in a field of study, and publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Notice that actual knowledge and effectiveness in an area of work mean absolutely nothing in that scheme of things. In the area of official government child protection, a person is given enormous decision-making power, yet the qualifications for assuming that power are tied solely to time one has spent in a classroom or writing formal papers.

One would think that such activities would ensure better decision-making, but do they? Today, the police are much more “professional” and “better-trained” than they were generations ago, but what do we get out of it? Police brutality is worse, the attitude of police toward citizens is much worse than it was in the days of the beat cop, and police unions and the ties to politicians ensure that cops rarely are held accountable for their wrongful actions. (When there are legal payouts and settlements, the taxpayers are held responsible, not the individuals or organizations that actually engaged in the wrongful behavior.)

Likewise, we have seen a whole class of “child protection” experts arise, complete with a string of letters after their names showing off their formal training, yet does anyone here really trust CPS at all? Would any reader welcome a visit to one’s home by a CPS worker, who supposedly has all of the proper qualifications for the job?

What do we mean by expertise for a job? Furthermore, have we even considered that many government positions exist for the sole purpose of intervening in the lives of individuals and families in ways that people on the end of that intervention find to be just plain wrong? No, we prattle on about “qualifications” as though a bunch of letters after a name ensure that decisions made by these people always will be just and right.

Spend some time. Study the Constitution. ALL that the federal government is allowed to do is explicitly stated. 99% of what our government does is patently ILLEGAL. The feds have almost no authority over individuals. But they do what they do because 99% of the people have no idea of where their authority ends.

Learn the truth. Quit voting for azoles who violate the Constitution for ANY reason.

We the People OWN this country. We the People have he legitimate authority.

In our system of government, contrary to ALL other systems, We the People are in charge and our government only has the power to do what we allow. But We the People are ignorant and let the azoles do much, much more than they are authorized to do.

If you had bothered to read my whole response and not just the first couple of line then reacted, you would have noted that I addressed most of your subsequent response.

This has nothing to do with wanting “the most qualified people for the job.” First, we ask, “What job?” Second, we ask, “In charge of WHAT?”

Well your whole post seemed to revolve around the question, how did we get to where we are? What specifically and what generally in our culture lead us to this point of fearing every shadow and every boogieman.

Generally speaking, I was responding to your criticism of the use of experts as societal leaders. As a culture I was saying when we have to select a person for a job (be it, president, governor, mayor, the head of a bureaucracy) that it should be someone who can properly accomplish the tasks demanded by the job. Yes, unfortunately some bureaucracies are necessary. If that had not been intentional, then the use of scare quotes was unnecessary and you should have said that you disagree with the progressive belief that government should control our lives.

Third, the notion that some “expert” in Washington should be making decisions that only parents can make, or assuming that people from CPS care more about your child than you do is utterly absurd.

This isn’t a question of the use of experts but whether or not government (federal or local) has certain authorities. I’ll just point you to the part of my post in which I addressed this

And questioning where government should and shouldn’t have authority is an important conversation to have

Bureaucracies are not led by “the most qualified people,” whatever that means. They are led by people who enjoy having power over others.

Again I’ll just point you to the part of my post where I address this

Now I’m not saying the people in charge are the most qualified (or at all qualified). nor do i disagree with the idea that bureaucracies are power hungry machines, or that they do more harm than good

Finally…

I would wonder if Kant ever has had any encounters with bureaucrats.

Seriously, Will? are we not keeping things civilized?

One thing I like about hooligans is they have a great eye for people who’ve lost perspective concerning the importance of yard care.

Hell, I’m almost 40, but after reading your curmudgeonly comment I’d be more than willing to salt your rose bushes and give you a truly vicious lawn job.

Have you seen “Up!” yet, because really, you should…soon.

As for the last post, we see the non sequitur trotted out time and again. I never wrote about “social contracts” because there is no such thing as a “social contract.” The “social contract” is a contrivance by people in power, created so they can claim that when they engage in massive wealth transfers, the people who are harmed can be told that the harm is done in the name of the “social contract,” which then supposedly legitimates the government’s behavior.

I’m not sure how the author of that comment is able to draw out a conclusion that I am telling kids to trash someone else’s property. Allowing a child to engage in independent behavior is not the same as telling them to stomp on a neighbor’s flowers.

I suppose …that the author assumes good parenting skills on the part of the parents of free range kids is implied in his work? otoh, The assumption that our social contracts are still in good order is less than accurate and bears no resemblance to reality.

Nostalgia is ok, but we shouldn’t base our assumptions, or social and political philosophies, upon memories of a daydream of better times.

You best friend growing up was Bill Fries? THE Bill Fries AKA C.W. McCall?

Now I know why he’s such a good storyteller!

Fowler, Modern English Usage, p 394: “It is a mistake to suppose that the pronoun [none] is singular only and must at all costs be followed by singular verbs etc.; the OED explicitly states that plural construction is commoner.

Bureaucracies are not led by “the most qualified people,” whatever that means. They are led by people who enjoy having power over others. I would wonder if Kant ever has had any encounters with bureaucrats.