Yes, that’s correct. It is they whom you are paying. If she appeals to some other government, then not only will it be expensive for her, but she must risk that it will not wish to interfere in foreign affairs.
Oh, dear. Here we go. I’m sorry. I just really don’t have time for this. Let us all just stipulate that libertarianism is an impossible dream, and that there is never a problem involving 12-year-old girls and 13-year-old boys in America. I gotta go. Wife will be home in twenty minutes.
Right, but what I’m trying to get at is it doesn’t make sense to say you have rights if you don’t get to exercise them yourself. I currently have the right to vote, for example, but if there were another person who could override my vote to serve my alleged best interests–“No, dear, Mr. Smith will cut funding to your local police department, so let’s go ahead and vote for Mr. Jones instead”–then I wouldn’t say I had that right anymore. I wouldn’t be voting; someone else would be voting in my name, even if 95% of the time he voted the way I asked him to.
Certainly, but I’d expect the other country to put up a fight if they believe she’s an independent citizen as strongly as I believe she isn’t. Even though it’d mean a lot to me personally, I don’t think it’d be a good idea overall for my government to declare war on, say, a country like North Korea, risking a nuclear attack and sacrificing thousands of soldiers just to get one child back.
I thought these governments had no borders, and you could sign up with one just by declaring your allegiance, paying a fee, etc., rather than having to physically immigrate.
But all right, if I have to make this more complicated, I will. 
The friend who told her about this new government–let’s call it Kidsylvania–is also interested in becoming a member, and after school one day, instead of walking home, they both went to the local Kidsylvania office. My daughter was placed in a safe house set up by that government for this very purpose while she decides on employment and housing - they know that citizens of other governments sometimes have the bizarre notion that they have authority over certain Kidsylvanian citizens, and new members tend to get abducted if they aren’t protected somehow.
Kidsylvania also knows that most of their new members are young people with little money or work experience, so they waive the up-front membership fee and help her get a job and housing in exchange for taking a bigger cut of her income for the first few years.
Ever since I punished her when I found a condom in her room a few months ago, she doesn’t trust me enough to talk about anything serious.
If you intend to prosecute everyone whose children try drugs without their knowledge, you’ll have a line in front of the courthouse stretching all the way to the moon.
The founders of Kidsylvania are idealists who consider themselves the modern equivalent of the Underground Railroad, freeing unfortunate individuals who they feel are treated unfairly by other governments. They also run a few garment factories where nimble young fingers come in handy, and although they don’t force any of their citizens to work there, it is the easiest option for many of them.
(Also, it doesn’t hurt that many of their new members have no work experience and don’t know the value of their labor, so they’re willing to sign long employment contracts for low pay. Most other governments don’t let them work at all, so there’s no real competition on wages. If she doesn’t work for the government factory, she can only really work for a business run by Kidsylvanians, who in turn pay the same government.)
Since she came to Kidsylvania with no assets, she pays for their services over time by giving them a larger than normal chunk of her income from the factory. Once she has paid back what would’ve been her initial membership fee, she pays a smaller portion of her income. If she leaves the factory and is unable to find employment anywhere else, her citizenship is revoked.
She’s 14 years old, if we’re continuing Left Hand’s example. As the protective parent, I naturally feel that she didn’t have the necessary emotional maturity. Kidsylvania’s laws state that everyone over 12 is mature by definition, though, and since there’s no medical test for emotional maturity, we’re at an impasse.
Factory housing for as long as she works there, until she has enough money saved up to move out to an apartment managed by Kidsylvanian citizens who are willing to make contracts with 14 year olds.
Perhaps they’re just starting out and they’re about to learn a horrible lesson. Or perhaps their experience has shown that 14 year olds who are treated as adults aren’t the victims an outsider might expect them to be.
The biggest threat to her freedom is the possibility of being abducted by her parents, and as long as she’s in the garment factory complex, she’s safe - they have their own guards, since they’ve had to fend off potential kidnappers before.
One of the first things she bought was a taser to defend herself when she leaves the grounds, and she travels with her friends who are also armed. They can only venture outside Kidsylvanian territory when they move as a group, so most of the foreign goods they buy are resold by adult Kidsylvanians who imported them.
The moral satisfaction of helping someone whom no one else will help… and the chance to profit from a cheap labor force who owes them their independence.
I hope these answers are realistic enough for you. It’s hard to describe how a hypothetical government in an unfamiliar hypothetical world would act without sounding a little bit far-fetched.
I promised you a response, Mr2001, and so I suppose I must respond. Not that it matters. I mean, what do we expect to happen here? Will you be going, “Oh, I see now. That answers the questions I ask, and I have no more, thanks.”? Probably not. Or how about, “Although I disagree with your philosophy, I respect it.”? Not so far. Maybe, “I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the hours you’ve devoted to this, especially considering that you own me nothing.”? Yeah, right. Or wonder of wonders, “You know what? There are so many resources on the Internet and my cognative skills are sufficient that, given the underlying theory you’ve outlined, I can answer almost all these questions myself.”? One can hear the ice crackle as it stretches across the floor of Hell.
The fact is that the scenario you began with grew, just as I said about all such scenarios, into a convolution of absurdity so foreign to reality, that even you, who are attempting with a straight face to present it, find yourself forced to call it “a little bit far-fetched.” Like Minnesota being a little bit cold, or a habanero being a little bit spicy. What began as a rebellious twelve-year-old running away from home has now become a parody of a parody, with a Larry-Moe-‘n’-Curly government that not only presides over, but actively solicits a population that cannot pay, that cannot fight in wars, that cannot sustain an economy, that is massively drug addicted, and that fucks like rabbits thus producing even more liability and headache for LMC. Lucky for you, I reckon, that all concerned find fortune and serendipity at every turn. Why you are concerned about your daughter at all is a wonder. Surely, a succession of miracles will sustain her.
In fact, I’m going to assist you in making your hypothetical work, as you’ll see shortly when we get to your responses to my questions.
Who has said she doesn’t get to exercise her rights? It is you who do not have rights with respect to your relationship with her. Like I already explained (…sigh…) you waived your rights when you had her. What you have are obligations, namely to exercise her rights on her behalf. The reason she cannot (as I explained) is that she cannot. She does not have the ability. As she grows older, she will become more and more capable of exercising her rights (to life and consent), but that is what your duty is — to assist her in making that happen.
You’ve probably already parsed and responded (not that I will see it) the above before getting here, so maybe I should have put this first to save you some time. But you and I mean two very different things when we say rights. You view them as permissions. I view them as attributes of ownership. Your voting example shows that you think that rights manifest as being allowed to do something (like vote). That means that you think rights are given from authority, and thus you are assigning what rights your daughter may have. But I don’t see it that way. Your daughter was born with rights inherent in the ownership of her mind (the right to consent) and body (the right to life). But (as I said before) if you had abandoned her at birth, she would have died. That’s because she wasn’t capable of exercising her rights on her own.
If you really are interested in this matter (which at this time I thoroughly doubt), there are oodles of posts describing in excruciating detail the deduction of rights from property. You are welcome to find those through searching. But I don’t expect we’ll see a strain on the hamsters anytime soon.
Who said anything about declaring a war? War is a broad topic. What did you think special forces are for? And frankly, your response sounds like Dukakis answering a question about his wife being raped. If it is indeed your daughter who is trapped in North Korea, I don’t think you’d be waxing all philosophic about the greater good.
Well yes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s on a spiritual plane. I mean, what did you expect? That she’d toss her money up into the air and Larry-Moe-‘n’-Curly would fetch it by telekenesis? She has to go somewhere, to some building, on some patch of land, to give someone, whom we presume is a physical entity, her magic money. Doesn’t she?
You really don’t. You can just drop it and say, “You know what? This is getting ridiculous.” As I said before, that’s what happens with these idiotic discussions. I answer all your questions, and then suddenly you surprise me with new exceptions to the answers that you didn’t present before. So the new stuff has to be re-answered to address the new characters, the new boundaries, and the new information. And so it goes until it turns out that, all along, we’ve been talking about Alice and her trip through the looking glass.
But I said I would assist you, and so I will.
Here’s the deal: Kidsylvania is owned and operated by a consortium of excentric billionaires who finance the building of homes for little people without the muscular development or coordination to build their own. Or is it aliens? No, billionaires. Whatever, they also finance a military composed of robots and androids, which they post as guards at the safehouses. I guess we can assume that those are surrounded by weapons and machines that are impervious to attack. Okay, we’re fine so far.
Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the money they need right now comes to them through a continuum of inter-dimensional contacts who push gold through worm holes. And they use brain machines to give the kids the necessary emotional and intellectual maturity to hold productive jobs in a cut-throat economy that… Oh! Oh! Wait! Wait! It isn’t cut-throat at all! It’s an economy of shared resources in which selfishness and greed have been supplanted by a desire to work together for the benefit of the government. Okay, I guess that’s covered.
Would that you had been as concerned about her values and her future as you claim to have been about her rights. Maybe you could have taught her personal responsibility and consequences of actions from the time she was much younger. Doubtless, she has led a whole (short) lifetime of crime and dispair, while you escaped being held responsible for your negligence, but we’ll ignore this because… well, just because it’s more convenient for our hypothetical. So we’ll just cover all this by saying that your government is blind and incompetent. All righty then!
Yeah. And Texas used to say that if you tried to have an economy without slaves, you couldn’t succeed. You really must decide whether it is or is not Libertaria that we’re talking about here. Of course, it’s more convenient for our hypothetical if we apply modern American permissiveness and irresponsibility, where people give more consideration to buying a new car than to having a child, so we’ll do that. Not only is government incompetent, so are parents. Heck, let’s say that they don’t even look after their kids at all. They just set them out on the porch while both parents go to work. Okay, that takes care of that.
Not to worry. That’s already covered, isn’t it? There are just enough Idealists, who are also entrepreneurs and savvy business managers, to hold the economy together. I mean, not that they would want to exercise these talents some place where it would benefit them, right? I mean, our Idealist entrepreneur isn’t going to start a business in Libertaria, because that would make him wealthy, and it would put a chink in our hypothetical. So let’s just say that they are… Oh! I know! They’re Beta drones, and they’re kept in line with Soma pills. There! That covers us.
Certainly. Let’s stipulate that this is an authoritarian libertarian government that actually owns things like factories. I know it’s a contradiction, but what the hey. Lucky for us anyway that the kids are bright enough to execute a plan to leave their parents’ care — care? let’s just pretend — and negotiate citizenship with a foreign government while simultaneously being dullards in every respect that benefits us. Let’s also just forget that we already stipulated that their governing fees would come from future employment, and that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by paying them low wages. Imaginary bullets don’t hurt. So okay, we’re covered on this.
Wow. You’re really making this hard. I mean, a larger than normal chunk of nothing is still nothing. Let’s see… Ah! Let’s use magic money! Money that is worth more in our hands than it is in theirs. We’ll say that when a kid is in possession of money, it is worth, oh, half of what it is worth when an adult possesses it. And let’s not burden ourselves with the possibility that we might lose her contract. After all, why would she regret her decision just because we kind hearted Idealists make her life a living hell? We’re doing a hypothetical here. We don’t need cause and effect or things like that. Okay, we’re covered here.
Good call. Let’s give her an extra two years, and let’s put aside reasonableness on the part of the Kidsylvania’s governers. We’ll say that they just trust people to tell them how old they are and tell the truth. We’ll pretend that no eleven-year-olds are enjoying the benefits of our billionaire Idealists. Oh sure, the law says twelve, but what does that matter? You know, 'twas brillig, and the slithy toves and all that. Everybody knows that it is on her twelth birthday that a kid is imbued with the sort of savvyness that we need for our hypothetical. So, that’s covered.
Dang. There goes that nitty problem about stretching and shrinking money again — enough to draw her here but not enough to sustain her, enough for her to pay rent but not enough to pay her fees to us, enough to keep her alive but not enough to buy the drugs she’s addicted to… Oops. Let’s forget about the drug addiction now because that’s inconvenient. Let’s just say that they lose their addictions when they sign with us. In fact, let’s say that, even though they were all rebellious and drug addicted fuck bunnies before while living with her parents, that they are now well behaved and hard working clothes makers who do our bidding gladly. Whew! That was a close call, but I think we’re covered now.
Dammit. The more we go on, the harder this gets. Oh dear. We are… yes! We are simultaneously billionaire Idealists who have in place factories and safehouses and apartment complexes while at the same time lacking all judgment and experience that produced these. Too much? Who cares! This is our hypothetical, and we’re gonna make it work.
Right. Besides, surely after six straight twelve hour days in the factory working for deflated wages and living in squalor too tired to party and too broke to buy drugs, the horrible memories of her luxurious bed, bountiful food, plentiful toys, television, cell phone, and school friends will motivate her to keep a low profile. Maybe we’d best say that the parents were destitute, that she lived in a hovel half-starved, and that she was a loner who had no friends. Dammit. Wait, except for the one friend that was convenient for us to use in our hypothetical. We’ve already stipulated abundant guards, but now that you mention it, we’d better have every square foot of land saturated with guards since we have kids from all over, and we’ll have to fend off no telling how many parents and their governments. We will pay for these guards by having a bake sale, which the parents of the kids will attend. A little skaky, but covered enough.
Oh posh. We’re dealing with magic here! She bought a taser AND a laser blaster AND a photon torpedo — all of it with magic money. And when they step on foreign land, the citizens there are — I got it! — always looking the other way and don’t see them! Yeah, that’s it. Plus, the foreign citizens miss their children only when their little feet are on Kidsylvanian soil. We’re going to have to give them time off, though, to go shopping with their worthless money that the foreign citizens accept out of the goodness of their hearts while they stare at the ceiling, looking away. So let’s make the day have twenty-eight hours. Four hours should be plenty enough time for shopping. That’s covered.
Nicely done! Dependent and independent at the same time. A cheap labor force that costs twelve kings’ ransoms to defend. I don’t have to add a thing to that. You covered it well.
Don’t be silly. It all sounds reasonable to me. And since I promised no further responses, I’m done. But this has really been enlightening and productive, and is doubtless exactly the sort of thing Shodan had hoped to see discussed.
Well, not always. 
Yes - that.
And this too. Especially this.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll stipulate the first part if you want, but not the second part. Certainly these problems exist, but–and here’s the important part–democracy provides us a means to try to correct them. If someone is preventing his daughter from exercising her rights in our country, and he’s doing so illegally, then I can call the cops. If he’s doing so legally, then I can agitate to change the law.
In libertaria, there seem to be these areas where folks can legally screw one another over (e.g., the daughter whose attempt to appeal her own minority status must be arbitrated by a judge who is de facto and de jure against her), and the only solution seems to be to commit illegal violence. Once that’s the only solution, then we’ve moved into might makes right. And I’m not comfortable with that.
Daniel
And wow, what a disrespectful post to Mr2001 that was. Lib, if your response to hypotheticals is to insist on details, then you have to expect people to provide details. WHen you respond to those details by ignoring them and posting absurd alternative details, that’s just petulance in action.
The fact is, not everybody in the world has the best interests of kids at heart. Under your Libertaria, it appears much easier for such people to abuse kids; and your vitriolic mocking of this concern doesn’t exactly allay it.
Daniel
So the fundamental nature of the dodge hasn’t changed, after all these years - Libertaria has everything our hearts could desire, unless it in fact doesn’t.
You refer to properties of Libertaria as if they’re a given in Libertaria, but when I ask you how they come to be so, they vanish.
I think I’ll just wander out of this conversation. Everything I might say to you, I’ve already said five or six years ago.
No kidding. I see I’ve been wasting my time here.
Liberal, maybe you should get started right away on that novel… if you can inject robots, magic, and drug-addled fuck bunnies into my scenario in just 24 paragraphs, I can’t wait to see where you’re at after 200 pages of writing.
BTW:
Are there no debit cards or checking accounts in Libertaria? This is sounding less and less like someplace I’d want to live.
If we want a realistic, plausible scenario to cover these questions in Libertaria, just think about what members of NAMBLA would do in a libertarian society. Remember, this is a group who is engaged on a doomed quest to change laws in a democracy to allow them to fuck children. There’s zero chance that their legal advocacy is going to succeed, but they try anyway. What do you think they’d do in a society in which anyone can form a government?
Daniel