The 'transition to socialism' is taking longer than originally thought. Don't destroy the revenue stream that the market economy provides the state while undermining those institutions that support the capitalist superstructure is the long term goal. Labour's 'third way' is a fraud. Labour's Marxism hasn't been ditched, the methods have only been reconsidered.

Yes, Peter; libertarians are all about having the State take over child rearing.

Not one of your shrewdest remarks.

Tom:

Nope, libertarians believe they should only have to fulfill social duties and responsibilities if they choose to. The vaccuum they leave behind when they don't has to be filled by someone.

And, BTW, you would be surprised at how many modern separated fathers believe their spouses and kids should take full advantage of all public support on offer before their obligations come into play.

Tom-

If 'natural law' based morality is divorced from the temporal legal process, a libertarian idea, then there is little justification for the moral basis of protecting and encouraging family life. Libertarians see little moral basis for anything other than taking the 'it's mine' approach. Property rights, for example, have a moral basis which transcend economic utilitarianism. What is the libertarian argument for more restrictive laws concerning divorce or abortion?

Shouldn't that read, the "Motherland Knows Best"?

Tom C;

On the contrary, in the libertarian view having children creates the equivalent of a contract, which obligates the parents to child raising. If you you don't want that burden, don't have children. I have yet to see any libertarian writing that suggests anything other than parents have the primary responsibility for raising their children and that turning children over to the State is a last, desperate option. In fact, it is precisely this kind of thing that forms one of the primary arguments by libertarians against the welfare state.

Peter;

And all those "modern fathers" are libertarians? I think not. The libertarian position would stop such fathers by removing or greatly restricting public assistance.

I agree with Peter to a certain extent. The contractual view of social obligations doesn't answer the question of who enforces the contract. If the state won't ensure that parents meet their obligations to their children, and won't take on the care of abandoned or neglected children, then neglected and abandoned children will be left to their own fate. The libertarian view is that, given no guarantee by the state that it will provide for abandoned children, parents will make the rational, moral choice to either not have children or will commit to support the children that they have.

This is a system that can only work for a society of uniformly virtuous people, which we all know doesn't exist. In order to ensure that children are neither abandoned or made wards of the state, the state has the obligation to act as the enforcer of those contracts that parents, either intentionally or unintentionally, enter into when they conceive children.

Tom-

What's the libertarian view regarding the marriage contract?

Not all Libertarians look alike. Jeeze.

AOG anticipated most of what I was going to say.

To Tom C.: That between the two adults, it's exactly that, a contract. Regarding the children, it's the parents' responsibility to care for them, since they created them. Peter, I am unconvinced by your seeming position that libertarians wimp out of taking a moral position on parental responsibility. The libertarian view - this libertarian's view, anyway - is that remiss parents should be tracked down and made to fulfill their obligations to their children...by the State if necessary. This is a STRONGER measure than conservatives' recommendation of just having social conventions like disapproval of wayward parents. Finally, who's arguing against such social conventions, anyway? I think they're good and I know of no libertarian who's against them.

Tom C., Peter: "libertarians believe...", "libertarians see..." I know what I believe, thank you very much.

Final comment: Peter, libertarians believe parents have specific duties to specific people, e.g., their children. The phrase "social duties" is fuzzy Leftspeak.

Tom/AOG:

I acknowledge you can be faithful to the libertarian outlook and still impose harsh financial obligations on separated parents. But it's worth recalling what a psychiatrist once said to me: "I've had lots of people in my office speak painfully and poignantly of the searing pain of waiting for daddy to come and get them and his not showing up, but I don't ever recall anyone needing my help because their father was behind with his child support payments."

But I really wasn't trying to get into father-bashing. In most cases, and certainly for the finacially struggling, the fact of separation creates a vacuum of authority that lessens parental control and influence because of the break in cooperation and the redefined remote and often adversarial relationship. Nature abhors a vacuum and third parties step in. I'm not accusing individual libertarians anymore than I accuse individual leftists of this. But if people base their marriage on theories of personal freedom and ongoing consent, you are going to have lots more divorces. It's one thing to say that's a price we must pay for freedom, quite another to pretend there are no downsides.

Peter - I appreciate this thoughtful response. I still disagree with some things in it, but I'll let it end there. On to the next thread!

Just wanted to point you guys to this related thread at Jane Galt's.