Police in Wilmette, Illinois recently considered charges against a mother for letting her 8-year-old daughter walk the family dog around the block unsupervised. Predictably, a lot of people are reacting with incredulity. ‘How can something like this even happen?’ they want to know.
It’s very simple. It happens because we’ve made failure illegal.
It’s easy to say: Look, the parents are responsible for the kid. If something bad happens, it’s their problem. And that should be the end of it, right? But it’s not, because that’s not actually how it works.
Suppose the kid wanders out into the street, gets hit by a car, ends up in the hospital, and runs up $100,000 in emergency room bills that the parents can’t afford to pay. (Or suppose someone else, swerving to avoid the kid, ends up in the hospital, with similar bills, which he similarly can’t pay.) Who ends up paying? Taxpayers.
So every time that kid walks out the door unsupervised, she’s putting taxpayer dollars at risk. Is it surprising that taxpayers would want to minimize that risk by preventing that behavior? It would be more surprising if they didn’t. And how are they supposed to do it, except by creating laws and regulations to punish taking risks?
There’s definitely some stupidity involved here, but it’s not in the regulations forbidding parents from leaving their children unsupervised, whether it’s in a street, or on a playground, or in a parked car while they run into a store to get a gallon of milk. Those are just predictable consequences of something else.
To find that something else, you have to look deeper — at the laws that justify this kind of prior restraint by forcing responsible people to subsidize irresponsible behavior.
Back in the 1980s, Cheech and Chong made a movie called The Corsican Brothers. The comic premise was that two twins were so close, they felt each other’s pain. Literally, if you hit one of them in the head, the other would say ‘Ow!’
It’s kind of a dumb premise for a movie, but it’s an even dumber premise for a society. And yet, this is one of the premises of modern society — that when one person does something reckless, it’s other people who should feel the pain… in their wallets. And it leads to situations like the one in Wilmette.
So why can’t people just mind their own business? Because in a world where everyone is potentially on the hook for your mistakes, there’s no such thing as ‘your own business’. Your business is everyone’s business.
That is, if we all pay (for the consequences of your behavior), we all get a say (in what you can or can’t do).
Alternatively, we could let people make their own decisions, reap the benefits when that works out, accept the consequences when it doesn’t, ask for help when they need it, and offer help where they think it’s appropriate.
There’s a word for people who do that: Adult. If we ever want to go back to having a society of adults, we’re going to have to make failure legal again.
