I'm talking about torture and murder [not smacking a recalcitrant brat or more garden-variety family nastiness, which is common all over the place]. I'd say about 95% in New Zealand. <what fraction of child abuse is attributable to welfare payments, in your humble opinion?>
<I can only assume, in your opinion, that if the government intervenes to remove a child from an abusive parent, it is by definition, doing something poorly. Or am I miss-reading your sentiment?>
By definition, removing a child from a parent requires tribal decision-making. But the problem isn't so much the parent [the mother] as the males who hang around [not usually the father] who perpetrated the main horrors.
As I've laboured the point, protection of person and property is the function of governments [in the way I'd run things]. There isn't anyone else to establish protection of property and person other than tribal anarchy. Which is how things worked before civilisation.
When I say "poorly", nearly everything we do is "poorly" in absolute terms, that is compared with perfection. Poorly in this case means compared with capitalist free market competition. Maybe child protection could be privatized. I haven't figured out how. If you have ideas, they might be worth considering.
So yes, governments do the job of protecting infants poorly, but I can't come up with a better way than government of protecting children against torture and murder. The first way governments can protect them, is stop paying the perpetrators, who can't be easily identified and they have to be stopped BEFORE they do the crimes.
Maybe governments should run supervised welfare centres and those who can't cope themselves could live in a dormitory - a poor house. They would be supervised always. A veritable prison system! Nobody would want to be in there unless they really needed help.
<<Final test. How do you stop cruelty and murder of infants? >>
< The only way I can conceive of is through intrusive oversight, >
Damn, you failed again. This is harder work than getting a dole-bludger back to work [without cutting their dole].
Stop producing the problem, then the oversight wouldn't be necessary.
Regarding your "Monetize everything" idea, money is the definition of human value. A metre defines distance, a kilogram defines mass, a lumen, acre, gallon, rad and so on all measure something. A dollar is a human value measurement. Dollars and cents are the bytes and bits of human interaction for trading things and services.
Maybe a "Matrix" definition of reality in $ could be developed. Money is very approximate and precision is improving and there is already some form to that idea. There didn't used to be money. Now it's pixelated right there on your cyberphone or at least credit card.
It's a question of precision. As precision increases, the relative cost of measurement increases and you quickly reach a financial entropy problem, or Heisenberg Financial Uncertainty Principle, where the attempt to measure the value exceeds the value and it all goes awry.
It might be easier to develop a Grand Unified Theory of Everything in physics, to close the gap between the macro and photonic/gravity realms and the four forces of the apocalypse. That's hard enough, let alone what you are suggesting.
You will bump into the problem "Is consciousness continuous" or is a quantum theory of consciousness needed and what is the $ value of one quanta of consciousness?
I can't see a full monetization any time soon. So, yes, we are stuck with politics as usual and some wanting more, and some wanting less, busy-bodying and taxation and similar chimpoid alpha male kleptocratic territorial dominance hierarchy violent bossiness.
Meanwhile, the more gory mistakes of that process could be avoided. Such as, for example, the torture and death of children in the "welfare" world of Big Government.
Mqurice |
