The dependably insightful Melanie McDonagh has a refreshingly clear view of one of the two ‘Home Alone’ items currently clogging up the British media until some domestic or foreign disaster provides some real news.
In case you are unfamiliar with the story, a middle class mother in London somewhat deranged by depression walked out of her house, abandoning Rufus, her 12 year old child, leaving him to fend for himself. He managed to do so for two weeks before someone noticed and reported him to Social Services, in spite of his attempts to hide the fact of his mother’s absence. It was the fact that Rufus tried to conceal his mother’s dereliction which caught Melanie’s eye.
There is one further element of this story that stands out. It’s the villain. It’s the thing that Rufus does everything to avoid, that looms in his imagination like some sort of nightmare.
That is the fear that he will end up in the hands of Wandsworth social services. And I can’t have been alone in feeling my spirits sink at the news that Rufus ends his adventure in the hands of social workers, to whom he’s been turned in by the police, even though they pass him on to family friends rather than to an institution.
It wasn’t irrational fear that made him do anything to keep himself out of their hands. He’d been in care before – another thing that sets him apart from the other pupils at Emanuel School – for some months after his father died and his mother succumbed to depression.
Melanie McDonagh is always good at spotting the ‘off message’ angles to stories such as these. I have followed her career with interest ever since she wrote about the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina that was a head and a half better than most of the dreck which passed for reporting there. It has always puzzled me why she is not a better known journalist than many of the blowhard Idiotarians that infest the British media with one tenth her talent.
Maybe she is not well known because she isn’t, a no talent blowhard Idiotarian.
Maybe she is not well known because she isn’t, a no talent blowhard Idiotarian.
Merry Xmas
You seem to be making the case that funding for Wandsworth should be increased to the point where it is able to provide for an environment that abandoned 12-year-olds would not be fearful of, or that the handling of abandoned children should be improved in some other way.
Hey Elton… we musta been reading different articles!
Elton Beard: I think the point Melanie was making was nothing more complex than the fact most children prefer imperfect parents to any social worker, regardless of how well meaning they are. What on earth does funding have to do with anything? A well funded nightmare is still a nightmare, no matter how much money you throw at it.
However I was not really trying to make some profound libertarian point with this article, I just wanted to point out that I think Melanie McDonagh is a real class act in a profession not exactly overflowing with class acts.
Perry de Havilland: Fair enough, I had responded under the impression that you were trying to make a point. But since you ask… while being orphaned or abandoned can be likened to a nightmare, that’s just a metaphor. In reality, more money can buy a better quality of care for abandoned children, just as more money can buy a better quality of almonds or accommodations. I was under the impression that this was sort of the basic idea behind capitalism and all that.
Like your site, though. I’ve always thought that libertarians have much more in common with liberals than with conservatives – if they just realized that money is fungible, and what Ashcroft is collecting in his pocket is not. At worst, liberals (who are quite distinct from leftists, BTW) want to take some of your cash. Conservatives want to control your behavior. Which is worse?
Elton: Taking your cash often involves policies that control your behaviour.
For example, you pay tax on tobacco products in order to dissuade you from smoking.
The state is not your friend.
Phillip: Too true, and I will not generally defend that sort of taxation. I usually prefer to regulate behavior directly when necessary, e.g. “No Spitting”, and tax according to other criteria.
And of course the state is not exactly my friend. But neither are powerful private corporations exactly my friends, and who will protect me from being harmed by them? As a liberal I would like to minimize regulation, but where regulation is necessary, I don’t see a better agent than a democratic state.
Whilst of course any group of people has the capacity to harm others, the thing about private corporations is that they have vastly less power at their disposal… even Microsoft pales into comparision to what a nation can do to people.
It is much easier to avoid or refuse a company than a state, as the later reacts to a disinclination to pay taxes (for example) for unwanted ‘services’ in exactly the same way as the Mafia reacts to a disinclination to pay protection money for unwanted ‘protection’. I have yet to hear of Microsoft sending the boys-in-blue/goombahs around because someone refused to purchase MS products and got a Macintosh instead…
Private corporations have vastly less power at their disposal than does the government precisely because we, the people, have constructed a system that balances power in that manner. Government is supposed to be our group, after all. (Well, at least in theory.)
But we’ve wandering away from my original secondary point – which is that taxing or otherwise absconding with some of my money hurts me less than almost any other form of legal regulation or penalty. It’s not that every law restricts me from doing something I necessarily want to do – criminalizing bungee jumping will have no effect on my lifestyle. But a bungee aficionado would certainly prefer that part of his bungee budget be taxed, reducing his freedom to bungee only somewhat, rather than have his hobby criminalized, eliminated said freedom completely.
And if you accept that premise, then the conclusion I’d like to propose is that liberalism is philosophically more congruent with libertarianism, as compared to either rightists (i.e. conservatives, fascists, theocrats) or leftists (i.e. democratic socialists, socialists, communists), since liberals, despite being somewhat less tax averse, do rather share libertarians affection for personal freedoms.