Following up on my previous post, I can't resist quoting one paragraph from Neil Reynolds's advance review of The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, the new book by Professor Kenneth Minogue. The columnist cites, from the book, a horrific example of the British government's plans to control the personal lives of ordinary people.
Prof. Minogue writes from Britain, where the Labour government (2007) began seizing “unacceptable” families and holding them, without consent, for extended periods of behaviour-modification training by cadres of civil servants from eight government departments. These families had a record of drug addiction, child violence and poor mental attitudes. Where, he asks, will this cleansing end?
Before you say that such things would never happen in the USA or Canada, think of how many instances you're aware of where an agency like Child Protection Services has stepped in to take children out of homes which they deem "unsuitable".
I was discussing this with Agent 3 yesterday. He remembers a case in rural Ontario where the local Children's Aid Society (the equivalent of CPS) took two children away from their parents because a city-bred social worker was appalled that their farmhouse had only an outdoor toilet and she had noticed "a couple of bruises" on one child's arms.
The parents had to fight the CAS for custody of their own children. The small-town judge who heard the case suggested that the CAS had been a mite over-zealous, and gave the kids back. That was over 40 years ago, but Agent 3 opines that there is, if anything, more state intervention in our lives today than there was then.
When, he and Walt ask, will the almighty government remember that the government that governs best governs least? When will they leave us alone?!
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