Billy Beck: [1]
“Great” Britain
It killed Baby P [2]. The actual murder was bought and paid for out of state benevolence.
That kid was only seventeen months old, and the people ostensibly charged with responsibility for looking out for him watched it all happening and did nothing.
The essential thing to keep in mind through all this is the manifest divorce of authority from responsibility. The rotten mother and her perp boyfriend will sit a while, but the jobholders will not relinquish their poses. They will carry on with straight faces while that kid moulders in his grave.
The thing is, Billy, is that this kind of this is eminantly predictable, even on the face of it. Once government steps in to take over a responsibility… as you say… ostensibly … from the individual, in this case, as regards their responsibility as parents, what can be expected except that the individual will expose themselves as being totally unsuited to tend their own affairs? They’ve never been trained to accept such responsibility, and have never been expected to do so.
And, of course once that happens, government exposes itself as being totally unsuited to the task they’ve appointed themselves, as well, as in this case. As a result, we’ll have exactly what we had on the floor of the commons the other day… finger pointing, and a lot of heat, but not much light. It becomes not an issue of whose job it was in the first place but an issue of political football, since nobody will ever question that the government should have done something.
Think; everything government pushes itself into… Domestic examples… Energy… Economics, parenting, transportation… comminications, technology… gets fouled more or less proportionally to the degree of governmental involvement.
I suggest that while government should have a minimal backstop role in all these matters, what we see today is hardly to be considered minimal. We’d actually have a chance to make things work were government actually to respect the constitutional limits placed on it, which they have not.
Your chosing this case to comment on is well done… it is in fact emblematic of what we face today, across the board. Other governmental intrusions are less bloody, perhaps… but no less tragic in terms of negative impact on society.
And think; Tragic and public as this case has been, does anyone really think it’s the only such? Or is it just the only one we know about, since there’s a dead child’s body to be accounted for?