I have spent the last month chasing around after the 4 and 7 year old children of the family I’m an au pair for in Paris (live-in nanny + language classes, for those of you not familiar with the term). This occupation leaves me with time to think, if not the energy with which to do so. I’ve also found it has presented me with a surprising amount of food for thought.

I tend to hold that the best approach to both parenting and politics is a relatively libertarian one. By which I mean that if you give people freedom they tend to use it wisely and that this also stands true for children (within reason). Indeed, I’m coming to realise that my commitment to this libertarian ideal largely springs from my own, very libertarian, upbringing. My parents’ general approach was that I could make my own choices and if I made mistakes or got hurt then I would learn from that. I did make mistakes (still do, lots of them…) and I did get hurt, but I also did learn a lot and I feel that by the time I left the nest (rather earlier than most people) this had helped me prepare for life in a way that no other upbringing could have. But that’s not the point of this post, the point of this post is the part of my childhood I had forgotten and which taking care of other people’s children is slowly helping me remember again.

The truth is that by age 12 or 13 my parents didn’t give me rules anymore because they didn’t need to. From day one it had been required that I be polite, that if I did or did not want to do something I discussed it rather than scream about it, and that I clean up my own messes. Failure to follow these rules inevitably had me sent to my room to “find a better mood”. These were the ground rules which fostered an ability and predisposition to make my own rules to govern myself in other areas. And these are the ground rules the kids I’m currently taking care of just don’t have.

Without these ground rules I’m coming to realise that giving these kids any degree of freedom just isn’t practical. Not only do they not have the experience necessary to know what to do with that freedom (something which would be solved with time), they don’t have the necessary base on which to build their own set of rules in the place of those an adult might give them. Without someone imposing an outside set of rules on them, these kids wreak havoc, destroy the house, and injure one another.

Now my point here is not to say that adults acting within a society are the same as 6 year olds at home. Rather, it’s to convey the gnawing doubt in the ability of a population to go directly from extensive rule of law to a very minimalist, libertarian, legal system without some sort of step in the middle that contemplating this analogy has given me. And it isn’t a perfect analogy by any means, there are glaring differences between the needs and abilities of children in a home setting and adults in a societal one. Still, it raises an important question. Is a libertarian approach to the law possible? And what is necessary to make it so?

I’d had some sort of a vague idea that a libertarian legal system would be a mess at the beginning and then sort itself out over time as people got used to having freedom. I’d never fully bought into this idea, but never found an alternative for it either. Now I’m beginning to think that one really is necessary.

If we look at the alternative as instilling a set of ground rules, what does this mean on a societal level, and is it even really possible?

Reading back through this I can see that it might sound somewhat elitist, as though there there is some group the ‘people’ of six year old intelligence who need to be educated by the elite group, the ‘adults’. I want to make clear that that wasn’t my intention at all. Indeed, this is at the heart of the whole complexity of the issue. Here there are no ‘adults’ (and no ‘children’ either), there are just people in society some of whom take it upon themselves to try and organize that society. Those who control the law try and place it as some sort of ‘adult’ in the playground of life, but the truth is that the people behind it are just the same as everyone else there in everything other than what they have chosen to do with their lives. Still, we can accept our own place in the playground and still work to find the most practical model for the law, the two are not mutually exclusive.