|
Take Back Our Kids Exclusive to STR March 29, 2007 One
month ago, my wife and I had our third child and first son. (Okay, my wife
had the child; I mostly stood around and said important things like,
“Keep pushing!”) As incredibly joyous and awe-inspiring as childbirth
always is, the event was blemished—if only in retrospect—by the
intrusion of the State into the delivery room. The parental instinct is to
protect your offspring—especially newborns—from all threats, so it was
with more than a little dismay that I stood by helplessly and watched
Leviathan sink its hooks into another one of my children literally moments
after he left the womb. Don’t
believe me? Let’s walk through a day in the life of a newborn. In
New York, as in most other states, if you give birth at a hospital and
there is no medical emergency, the first thing they do after cutting the
umbilical cord—even before “allowing” the mother to breastfeed her
child—is take the baby over to an examination table and drop some
ointment in their eyes. In the old days, the ointment was silver nitrate,
which often burned the eyes of the newborn. Now, they mostly use
erythromycin, which is less caustic but still causes frequent irritation
and even infections. The
drops are a “prophylactic” against blindness caused by venereal
disease, and the law mandates them. Sure they cause intense discomfort to
a helpless baby who, all things considered, would rather give that
breastfeeding thing another go. On the other hand, it’s a small price to
pay to save the child’s eyesight. Just one problem—neither my wife nor
I have any history of venereal disease. In a free and sane society,
parents would be left to consider their own sexual history in consultation
with their doctors and decide for themselves where it’s medically
necessary to inflict this painful treatment on their newborns. The
next thing they do, after wheeling the mother from the delivery room and
checking her into the most expensive bed-and-breakfast in town, is hand
one of the parents a form to obtain the child’s birth certificate and
Social Security number. You’re supposed to turn in the form before you
check out of the hospital. As my wife is usually busy resting or feeding
the baby at this point, it has always fallen to me to fill out the
paperwork. As an anarchist libertarian, I always cringe at this
distasteful task—even more than at changing diapers filled with
multi-colored newborn poop. As with the birth of each of my kids, I
entertained fleeting fantasies of tossing the form in the garbage. I’m
not going to voluntarily enslave my son to the state! He’ll be a free,
unnumbered man! He’ll thank me for not selling him out to Leviathan in
his first hours of life. But
then reality sets in, and I picture a pissed-off teenage son unable to get
a part-time job or driver’s license because his old man was a stubborn
ideologue. More shamefully, I picture myself missing out on a dependent
deduction on my income taxes, or having to shell out cash for every
doctor’s visit because my insurance won’t cover a dependent without a
Social Security number. So I sheepishly fill out the form and insert it in
the little wooden box by the nurses’ station. On
and on it goes. Over the next few months, we’ll start the battery of
mandatory vaccinations against long-vanquished diseases, many of which
vaccines have been linked to occasional severe side effects. With each of
our first two children, my wife and I convinced ourselves that we were
choosing the vaccines based on the best medical wisdom, not because we
were selling out yet again to Leviathan. There is some truth to
that—because we homeschool our children, the threat of denying them
admission to the K-12 government indoctrination centers means little to
us. On the other hand, the state’s tentacles reach even to backup
daycare centers and summer camps requiring proof of vaccinations. And
then there is school. As I mentioned, our kids are or will be homeschooled,
but even so, we’d have to be blind to think our kids will go unexposed
to the statist propaganda machine simply because we’re taking charge of
their education. Yes, they’ll get far less propaganda under our care
than at the youth internment centers, but the statist quo insinuates
itself into virtually every type of media, from home-education workbooks
to “educational” software to DVDs to popular children’s books to
television. The Marxist-environmentalist dogma alone permeates most pop
culture consumed by youth. Moreover,
I simply think it would be a mistake to shield my children from every
harmful idea out there, even if I could. The very notion strikes me as
Orwellian. The best defense against bad ideas is better ideas, not
censorship. I’m sure there are some parents who homeschool because they
want to limit what their kids are exposed to, but I prefer it for
precisely the opposite reason—because I believe my wife and I can offer
our children exposure to so much more than the government schools
ever could. The
secret to raising libertarian children in an unlibertarian world is not to
hide them from the influence of the state, when the state already has had
their hooks in them from the moment they left the womb. No, the answer is
to counteract the collectivism around them by ensuring their exposure to
pro-freedom, individualist ideas on a regular basis. Think of it as an
equal-time provision for individualism. Now,
it would be wonderful if children would read Human
Action, but as accessible as that classic tome is, it’s
really meant for grown-ups, or at least teenagers and up. Similarly, it is
unlikely that any child will cheer when you pop a Nathaniel Branden
lecture into the car stereo instead of a Wiggles CD. No,
children—even more so than grownups—are creatures of pop culture. If
we want them to absorb the ideas of freedom, we have to deliver those
ideas through entertaining books, movies and TV shows. Fortunately, there
are plenty of libertarian gems to found among the collectivist garbage,
and the best of them are a pleasure to consume for kids and their parents
alike. The following are some of the best children’s books on freedom I
have encountered as a parent (and former child). For
pre-schoolers (the statists start early, so we must start early too), Dr.
Seuss authored such anti-government classics as Yertle
the Turtle, in which the eponymous king is overthrown by, well,
a burp. As far as I can tell, the turtle pond government is ultimately
replaced by an anarchistic utopia: And
today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, Is
King of the Mud. That is all he can see. And
the turtles, of course... all the turtles are free As
turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be. For
a good anti-war Seuss book, I recommend The
Butter Battle Book. Written at the height of the Cold War, it
tells the tale of an arms race (between the butter-side up Yooks and the
butter-side down Zooks), which escalates into the threat of mutually
assured destruction. Unfortunately,
the great Seuss sometimes missed the mark. In particular, I’d steer
clear of The
Lorax, which evokes the “save the earth” hysteria of the
early 1970s. Your kids will be exposed to more than enough
environmentalist extremist propaganda on their own. As
your kids get a bit older, they definitely should take a look at the great
Little
House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Although pre-teens are probably
the target audience, my five-year-old and I have been reading them
together each night, and she absolutely loves them. We’ve finished Little
House in the Big Woods and Little
House on the Prairie, and now we’re working on the third book
in the series, On
the Banks of Plum Creek. That’s the book that will be most
familiar to fans of the 1970s Little House television series, as it brings
the Ingalls family to Robin
Hood is a children’s story I recommend with reservations. The ancient
outlaw tale can be read as either a socialist or libertarian allegory,
depending on who is doing the reading and who is doing the telling. The
cliché is that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor; in
other words, he was an early practitioner of “redistribution of
wealth” for “social justice.” But that interpretation does Robin a
disservice. When you think about it, he stole from the tax collectors and
returned the money to the taxpayers, who were its rightful owners. His
Merry Men were literature’s first anti-government militia, and they
brandished assault weapons to do battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham and
Prince John. There are dozens of versions of the Robin Hood tale in print,
and many of them lean toward the socialist interpretation. The Scholastics
Junior Classics edition by Ann McGovern seems to get the
pro-freedom message right: “High taxes, outrageous rents, and fines made
the poor even poorer as they tried to scratch a life out of the fields . .
. .” (page 6). Probably
the most famous libertarian children’s book (among libertarians) is The
Adventures of Jonathan Gullible by Ken Schoolland. One of the
marks of a truly successful juvenile book is that it can be enjoyed by
adults as well as children, and on that count Dr. Schoolland has clearly
succeeded. In fact, I suspect that Jonathan Gullible has probably been
read by more grownups than kids. Each chapter addresses a commonly
misunderstood economic or political concept and humorously lampoons the
conventional wisdom. Those
are my personal favorites among the freedom literature for children, and I
know I left out some worthy titles. (The anti-authoritarian themes in the Harry
Potter books alone probably merit their own article. My libertarian
sci-fi friends tell me Robert Heinlein’s juveniles are outstanding, but
unfortunately the only Heinlein I’ve read is The
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which is definitely an adult book.)
However, the genre is definitely finite, and much smaller than that of
adult books on liberty. My own humble contribution to the body of libertarian literature for young adults is The Walton Street Tycoons, recently published by East River Press. I wrote it because, as a parent and an activist, I saw a need for it. By the time our kids reach adulthood, it may be too late to expose them to the ideas of liberty. Also, as a capitalist, I saw a niche that I could exploit for fun and profit. What kid wouldn’t want to read about other kids striking it rich and thumbing their noses at authority? Surprisingly, I have very little competition. That may be good for my bottom line, but it’s not so good for the future of freedom. Jim
Lesczynski is the father of three children and the author of The Walton Street Tycoons.
|
