The other day, a friend and I were discussing one of his neighbors. We probably all know someone like this — if it weren’t for bad luck, he’d have no luck at all. But his bad luck seems to be caused almost completely by his own inability to carry out some of the basic functions of adulthood.
My friend joked that the guy ‘should be able to become a ward of the state, because he can’t take care of himself’. And while he was kidding, I think there was a kernel of wisdom in his suggestion. So I started thinking about how that would work in practice.
First, for the state to accept him as its ward, it would need someplace to put him. Fortunately, our Soviet-style, micromanaged economy has created a glut of empty commercial real estate (shopping malls, office buildings, warehouses, mill buildings), which could be purchased or leased at rock-bottom prices, and used for this purpose.
(This isn’t so far-fetched. It turns out that there are already real estate developers who are turning old malls into new retirement communities.)
Similarly, as retail stores like J.C. Penney and T.J. Maxx are driven into bankruptcy, their inventories of beds, linens, clothing, and other essential items should be available at steep discounts. So wards would have shelter and clothing.
They’d also need food. A lot of restaurants are going under, which means their chefs would be available to plan meals, exercising their creativity by finding ways to make use of whatever surplus foods are being discarded daily by grocery stores. (Many people would be astonished to learn how much perfectly good food is thrown away each day.)
Of course, there would be no alcohol or drugs allowed in these facilities, since by definition the decision to ingest such substances is reserved for adults. That would provide a detox/rehab opportunity for those who need it, and would allow us to divert some of our scarce police resources from fighting the war on drugs to more important considerations, like breaking up church services and weddings and homeschool gatherings where people aren’t allowing public health to trump everything.
Mandatory contraception would be required for children capable of producing children (between puberty and menopause or andropause). That would reduce the number of unwanted children being born.
The property of the new wards would be liquidated in order to defray the costs of care, just as when people enter other kinds of assisted living facilities.
Everyone wins. People who want to behave like children can do that, and the rest of us don’t have to clean up the messes they make when they burn their houses down or crash their cars by accident, run up extravagant hospital bills that they can’t pay, conceive children that they can’t care for adequately, cast uninformed votes, and so on.
And there’s a huge side benefit, which is that since entry and exit to these facilities would have to be tightly controlled, we would be able to provide the residents with isolation from COVID-19, or whatever the next scary thing turns out to be. In fact, many people might actually declare themselves to be children just to be able to live in such a safe space — which would get them out of everyone else’s hair, and make it harder for power-hungry politicians to get elected by pandering to them.
(Note that voluntary unemancipation would not be an option for people who need extensive medical care. This isn’t about infirmity. It’s about incompetence.)
There are, of course, lots of details to work out, but we should get the conversation started now, so that by January, the Let Children Be Children Act can be introduced along with all the other new bills for the coming legislative session. Here’s a quick first draft of the bill:
WHEREAS:
Children and elderly people can be treated as wards of the state if they are not competent to be left alone, and have no one to accept responsibility for their welfare; and
Age is not a reliable indicator of competence (as evidenced by the fact that some people graduate college at 13, while others develop dementia at 30); and
Childhood and adulthood are psychological and not exclusively physical states, having more to do with attitude and capability than with age;
THEREFORE:
Any adult shall be able to declare himself a child for all legal purposes, thereby becoming a ward of the state under the same conditions as a child who becomes orphaned, thereby accruing the benefits of childhood (including eligibility for various social programs), and giving up the rights and responsibilities of adulthood (including, but not limited to, voting and entering into contracts).
We normally think of childhood as something we grow out of, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The defining characteristic of childhood isn’t age, but the ability and the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own well-being. Viewed in this way, you enter into childhood when you’re born, and may re-enter it again later, through disease or trauma or senescence. And viewed this way, some people never stop being children in the first place.
The Let Children Be Children Act would merely provide a legal framework for adding one more means of re-entering childhood, for people who find adulthood just too much to cope with, and who otherwise would burden society with costs much higher than the cost of keeping them pacified in residential group homes.
