{"id":164,"date":"2007-12-29T16:32:31","date_gmt":"2007-12-30T00:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=164"},"modified":"2007-12-29T16:32:31","modified_gmt":"2007-12-30T00:32:31","slug":"nanny-state-knows-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/nanny-state-knows-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Nanny (state) knows best"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spain has banned spanking<\/a>. Spain, of course, is not the first political jurisdiction to suggest that maybe Daddy doesn’t know best<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, I have often joked about not beating my kids enough–almost always with my kids in hearing distance–but I personally never saw a reason to actually strike them. I remember being struck by my own dad many times (probably more than he actually did), and not with fond memories, and resisted creating those same memories for my kids. But I would not have surrendered my right to do so. I certainly wouldn’t have handed power to the state to develop the bureaucratic machinery necessary to distinguish, say, a pat on a youngster’s butt, or aggressive handling of a child in need of reminding who is in charge, versus illegal “striking.”<\/p>\n

It takes a certain mindset to presume that the government can effectively make these distinctions<\/a>. One such genius is Sally Lieber<\/a>. As is typical of the kind of blindly liberal buttinsky that regularly gets elected in California, she proposed a bill to ban spanking, i.e., expanding government’s reach into the family room, without actually having raised any children herself.<\/p>\n

“Responsible parents have to give up the privilege to physically discipline their children for the sake of protecting children that aren’t being hit once in a blue moon or in a light way.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think the same line of reasoning should apply to severely curtailing state power on account of those who would exercise it irresponsibly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spain has banned spanking. Spain, of course, is not the first political jurisdiction to suggest that maybe Daddy doesn’t know best. Now, I have often joked about not beating my kids enough–almost always with my kids in hearing distance–but I personally never saw a reason to actually strike them. I remember being struck by my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collectivist-instinct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}