Strange libertarian argument of the day

This post, in which Andrew Cohen attempts to make a libertarian case for requiring licences to raise children, is apparently not meant as a parody. This argument pairs nicely, I think, with Murray Rothbard’s argument that parents should be free to starve their children to death if they wish (but not to assault them! Because that’s a distinction with tremendous moral importance!). I think the most succinct way to think about libertarian’s problem with children is this: Two of the central commitments of libertarianism are anti-statism and an a strong focus on individual rights, understood in strictly ‘negative’ terms. There’s more tension between these two commitments than most libertarians care to admit, but children expose in a precise and ruthless way. If you lead with anti-statism, you end up in danger of Rothbard’s vile madness; if you lead with individual rights protection, you risk Cohen’s path, in which case real and actual dangers of tyranny, which libertarians should be particularly attuned to, are casually theorized away. It is certainly true that just about any individualistic, rights-based theory has a very difficult time with children, but libertarianism in particular has a tendency to collapse spectacularly in the face of children.

In comments, Jacob Levy makes the argument that the real culprit here is so-called ‘ideal theory’ in which some constraints are treated as fixed, and others are assumed away. This is certainly true, and it bears a family resemblance to outlandish, ahistorical and transparently awful and/or appalling policy proposals from left-liberal philosophers  like Peter Singer and Philip Van Parijs (such as financial compensation for those who can’t find a marriage partner and maximum voting ages, in the case of the latter, and the permissibility of euthanasia for certain infants, in the case of the former).  On the other hand, I suspect there’s a distinction worth making between ‘really bad ideas that come excessively abstract thinking’ and ‘really bad ideas that come from excessively abstract thinking and badly violate an alleged core principle.’ It’s particularly striking that the thing that gets uncritically idealized by Cohen is state capacity, in an area where the reasons to be skeptical about state capacity are particularly and obviously strong.