Never happened, never will.

/mises.org

Lol if there were a flowchart to this thread, someone would ask to define "abuse or horrible act" and the arrow would bring you back to post #3.

How do you feel about Toddlers & Tiaras? Should the state step in?

Quote:

"I agree with that. Practically speaking the main time government should step in is when they can do it from the other end. Not allow lead paint. Mandate car seats. Make happy meals more nutritious."

"One of these is different, do you see why? "

If fast food was more nutritous and laws for children passengers was restricted to seat belts only, that would result in at least ten times the average health and life expectancy benefits as the converse.

Government has to be involved in parenting. Otherwise parents will just shove fat and sugar down their kids throats,smoke in the house/car with kids and let them play video games all day. We need a whole new bureaucracy to deal with these irresponsible parents,think of the govt jobs it would create.

dis my biography yo

dis also tramples on the freedomz

What we should have is a gov't agency whose sole purpose is to investigate and inform the public about practical and beneficial parenting strategies. This agency should not be enforcing any law, just advocating good behavior.

Oh, so now you're talking about average health benefits? That's quite different than your original post.

"Making fast food more nutritious" is not as practical as you make it sound. Fast food is also not poison, and the health effects are not linear. Having a weekly fast food meal is not going to have any detectable effect on your kid's health.

Your point would be made much better with soda.

How do people ITT feel about those parents who feed their kids McDonald's every day? Like this Michelin Tire mascot looking kid?

Sklansky, thinking about your OP has allowed me to clear up many thoughts that I have been trying to tie together.

I have concerns that you are completely losing touch, but I can't imagine that you posted OP entirely to rant.

I choose to believe that you wanted to start a thread that cause your 2+2 forum to move to define the function of government in logical terms, i.e. a mathematical formula. One that proves why a 200 lb overweight kid qualifies for intervention whereas a 100 lb overweight kid does not.

I believe this is a lofty, but worthwhile goal. Reminds me of Kennedy's determination to reach the moon, but a whole lot easier, because... you know- it's just logic. This is certainly the sort of topic that one could write a book about.

Enlist me to write the book, esteemed publisher-man.

The government should not be involved in individual's parenting. Diet, television, books, radio, none of it. However, it should obviously be illegal to do something such as inject your child with heroin.

I would not be opposed to something like making it illegal to smoke cigarettes around your child, and I'm mainly referring to babies through prepubescents. While it is true that parents make decisions for their children, forcing them to breathe cigarette smoke is imposing a cost to their health upon them, and one they cannot avoid. A child can refuse to eat fast food, for instance, and has to consume it willingly. This is not the case with cigarette smoke. Therefor, some government action may be appropriate and possibly even preferable. Should a parent have their child taken away for smoking around them? Absolutely not. But some sort of infraction isn't out of line at all in my view. Maybe something as simple as a fine. Maybe something as lengthy as a tax.

I may support something like this not only for smoking cigarettes around children, but marijuana, crack, and even something like burning dangerous substances around them like plastic or solder, simply because of the nature of it. It's a pollution of the air the child cannot avoid breathing, and it shouldn't be imposed upon them.

The government should not get involved imo.

You are making a mistake. You are equating "health and life expectancy" with "good." For example, eating happy meals may be detrimental to a child's health, but what if the kid really loves happy meals? How is anyone other than the happy meal-loving kid (or, by proxy, his parents) qualified to decide whether or not the health risks outweigh the subjective pleasure of eating delicious fatty foods?

yeah, and who's to say heroin isn't good? it makes you feel good, right?

You are mocking me, but, yeah, basically this.

Lirva is so emotional and inconsistent that no one needs to read his posts unless they want to be subject to Lirva's emotional stream of consciousness. He's a musician though, so maybe his emotions are really important. Maybe in 2000 years they'll make a movie called the Passion of the Lirva.

Government is not created by men for the sole purpose of making pollution illegal.

Government's purpose is enumerated in the preamble to the Constitution:

"..form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.."

The Constitution explains that our government has 6 objectives. Any law can be made under these guidelines, so long as it is not trumped by the Articles or amendments to the Constitution.

Freedom or Liberty is only one guideline, not the only one. If your freedom interferes with the Liberty of other people or the general Welfare, the government has the right to make it a crime.

Lirva, that's pretty much the whole point. There are plenty of examples, if you want them. However, what you want out of government is simply stupid. You want the government to not promote anything, and that's promoting ignorance. If you want a government that promotes ignorance, then you need to leave the USA, because that idea is essentially the antithesis of the Enlightenment principles upon which the USA was founded.

+1 no way will my kid be glued to a television. If you want to let your kid watch that crap, so be it, but I owe it to my future children not to rot their brains with that garbage. If my kids aren't reading regularly by the second grade I'll be ashamed of myself.

My wife and I are seriously considering getting rid of all our televisions when we have kids just to make sure we don't fall into the trap of defaulting to television as a diversion for the kids.

The problem with not having a TV at all is the same problem you have with any hard-line prohibition. It becomes more attractive forbidden fruit.

FWIW, my oldest is seven and just recently decided he was interested in reading, and has gone from pretty horrible at reading to reading better than his traditionally-schooled fourth-grade cousins in about six months.

I love how DS doesn't think twice about immediately dismissing television-watching as undeniably moderately bad for the kid. That vaguer-than-vague phrase immediately brings to mind a picture of a future diabetic stuffing junk food and soda down his throat while watching hours of television.

I don't think the government should regulate television watching, but if you want to debate the finer points of "undeniably moderately bad," a lousy diet and hours if inactive television watching seem like the place to start. For me. My kids will either be outside playing, inside reading, or otherwise doing something productive. There are probably a lot of parents that would characterize that as abusively taking away a proper childhood from my kids. Whatever, I respect that.

Which, as has already been touched on, is the problem with the OP. One person's "undeniably moderately bad" is another person's "arguably not bad" and another person's "perfectly fine."

We might have a television. There definitely won't be one in every room where television can conceivably be watched, like most houses nowadays. There is something to be said for having family television nights or rewarding a kid by letting them do what they want every now and then.

If the govt doesn't want kids watching too much TV put a huge tax on disney,nick and other stations for children,like they do with tobbacco,taxes to discourage use. When I was a kid children's shows were on about 3-5 on weekdays and til about noon on Saturdays,if they were on 24/7 I would have spent alot less time outside.