Abolish Childhood

By Barry Kuzay

The next class to receive emancipation is the only one in America that remains indentured:
children.

When the coercive activity of restricting action brings up the question of where to draw the
line, do not draw it at all! If the question can be somewhat rationally debated, there must
therefore be sound arguments on both sides. Just as courts in a civilized society operate on
the principle of innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, the rest of a
civilized society's laws must operate on the same principle. To restrict a person's non-
aggressive actions is to find them guilty of being incapable of performing those actions.
Might it be reasonable to doubt the guilt of every single person of a certain age?

We have all heard about many grandiose class-action lawsuits against corporations. But
have we ever heard of class-action lawsuits against a class' actions? This is civil war, with
judges and legislators on the front line fighting against the youth. The lawmen cannot win
the battle against America's youth without the support of America's elders, who have been
bribed by the lawmen though the generous "granting" of superior rights. Remember when
kings would grant noblemen land, title, and treasure in exchange for their support and
cooperation? Times have not changed. Democracy has simply expanded the number of
noblemen into a majority.

Every person cannot drive a car competently at the age of fifteen, cannot vote, have sex,
purchase guns, or enter contracts competently at seventeen, cannot consume alcohol
responsibly at twenty (or heroine at the age of one thousand years), and cannot drive a
rental car competently at twenty-four. The government asserts this lunacy, and much
more.

Bastiat's thoughts apply here: "The law perverted! And the police powers of the state
perverted along with it!"

A fairly reasonable individual will accept that there has existed, on this very planet, Homo
sapiens under the age of eighteen that have the rational capacity to responsibly enter into
voluntary contracts. In fact, a reasonable individual could extend this possibility to other
activities, and other ages. Flash! Reasonable doubt has been proven for this class of young
individuals, and any judge worth his position would never be able to convict anyone for
crimes of "underagedness"!

All seventeen year-olds have been found guilty of being too stupid to enter contracts. But
why set the limit at eighteen years? Why not use months? Wouldn't that be more
accurate? How can legislators look their citizens in the eye when they are carelessly toying
with our lives? A more accurate measurement of when a child becomes an adult by
government standards could very well be 211 months, which is 17.58 years. For
convenience, let's just round up to eighteen years. Actually, the number eighteen is quite
ugly. Maybe we should round up to a nice even twenty.

The unit of years is arbitrary. What is a year? One lap around the sun. How does
completing an exact number of laps around the sun grant someone more rights? On planet
Earth we experience these laps as cycling through the seasons, so perhaps living through
these cycles many times is what grants us rights.

This thought is easily proven invalid, because not everyone experiences these cycles. What
of Floridians who never see snow? What of obsessive-compulsive nomads who coordinate
their travel north and south in in order to never experience any seasonal fluctuations? What
of the Mysophobe family who never leaves their home and is oblivious to the weather
outside? Do the lifestyles of these people disqualify them from earning rights?

Are the commonly used ceiling numbers of sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, and twenty-five
arbitrary? The PhD snobs will cite large-scale studies with fancy statistics related to
probabilities and standard deviations, but unless they cite a 100% probability of failure, the
restrictions are incompatible with civilized society, and are therefore arbitrary. Is it
legitimate for the state to grant us rights so gradually? It is not within the state's authority
to grant any rights at all. Rights cannot be granted, traded, or sold. We are born with the
same rights we die with, whether we want them or not.

Americans gathered in colonies and created their own states. Then the states created the
federal government, framed within the Constitution they authored. How could something of
our own creation turn around and convincingly pretend to grant us something we already
have? Besides, nothing new or additional has been created. A portion of society has simply
been siphoned off and tossed into the category of government to provide the people with
organized collective force with the purpose of maximizing liberty by punishing injustice.

But now the wolves of democracy have a stranglehold in the civil war against America's
youth. What is the solution?

All government-sanctioned age qualifications need to be erased from big brother's books.
All of these heinous laws must be declared null and void. They are incompatible with
civilized society.

When does adulthood really begin? It doesn't matter. There is no sudden instant when you
become an adult, just as there was no specific instant when man evolved from its preceding
species. One logical definition of adulthood that has been given is when a person moves out
of their parents' home and into their own, beginning to live independently. It is a nice
definition, but government intrusion through laws and propaganda distorts the natural
timing of this event. Therefore, this definition cannot be used for legal purposes. The only
solution is to abolish government-declared childhood*!

*Not to be confused with the natural period of human development, for only a socialist would attempt to abolish nature!

Barry Kuzay [send him mail] is a highway research engineer and editor
of ConstitutionSociety.org.