NO THANKS

Our children will not thank us
Ottawa Citizen
By Pierre Lemieux

I did not always hate children. I spent a large part of the last quarter of a century enthusiastically caring for my own children, with the money the government kindly left me. I worked hard so they did not have to attend public schools, I taught them what is right and wrong and, a la Thoreau, which kind of so-called "laws" are only worthy of disobedience.

Now, it seems, children are born with social insurance numbers on their foreheads, medicare cards in their mouths and cell phones in their diapers - with direct snitch lines to the government. Consider how frequently our liberties are taken away in the name of children. I am not only talking about the child pornography witch hunt.

Remember the Liberal election propaganda, which shamelessly used photos of children to lure us into the Brave New World. For the sake of our children's future, we should renounce our traditional liberties and trust Big Brother.

Or consider the new tobacco health warnings. Two little boys implore us, with their innocent faces of would-be Liberal voters: "Don't poison us." Nasty parents! Here come to the rescue the nice bureaucrats and politicians. They adopt laws allowing them to send their praetorians after us if we smoke in the wrong places, produce cigarettes without broadcasting their propaganda, and so forth. Kids are hired to snitch on stores which sell cigarettes to youngsters without demanding ID papers.

The best of all children's worlds is still to come. Two Canadian public health experts are proposing that parents who smoke in the presence of their children be reported to authorities. The idea of licensing parents before they are allowed to raise their children has been circulating in academic circles for two decades. Unthinkable idea? Our parents would have said so for most of the laws now on the books.

Think about what we have done to protect children from drugs. The war on drugs has been an excuse for monitoring financial transactions and strengthening border controls, with sniffing customs dogs and human thugs to open our mail.

Or consider gun control, another cause into which children have been drafted by their surrogate parent, the State. More and more intrusive gun controls have been successively justified by the necessity of disarming criminals, of preventing honest citizens from using their guns in self-defence, of preventing individuals from harming themselves and, of course, in the name of innocent children. These controls have transformed many Canadians adults into criminals, and many others into something much worse: contented form-fillers.

Or, let's come back to the child pornography witch hunt, under which parents cannot take nude pictures of their children without risking that some busybody will call the State's praetorians. The actual sexual exploitation of real children must be prosecuted, but this is not a reason for creating a porn police state against virtual sins.

What kind of society are we building for these children? A society where people will be either rulers, criminals or life-long children. Remember what Alexis de Tocqueville, 150 years ago, forecast about the democratic societies of the future: "Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood."

We should hate those exploiters who use children as tools to enslave us. For when all heaven has broken loose and our children or their children wake up, they will hate the political child exploiters of today. They will blame us for not having stopped the nice tyranny while there was still time.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and author.