Reprinted from Rothbard-Rockwell Report July 1991. I don't believe it has ever been printed on mises.org or LRC.com. It is funny for two reasons: criticisms of the 'forgotten' parts of the libertarian party platform and because he admits he thinks NAP is a bad idea.

A few years ago, a friend of mine was invited to dinner at the home of a top Libertarian theorist and psychiatrist. The evening was disrupted, however, as the doctor’s small boy ran through the house screaming that he hated his father. As it turned out, the kid had a point.

The psychiatrist explained to my friend that since children have the same rights as adults, it would be imrrioral for him to force his son to go to bed. After all, he related, you can’t force your next-door neighbor to go to sleep just because you think it’s good for him. As a Libertarian, he could only try to persuade his child. The persuasion hadn’t worked, but that was the price of liberty.

The doctor went on to tell my friend about the moral dilemma he’d faced as a new parent: his baby hated having his diaper changed. Since we can’t force our next-door neighbor to change his clothes, can we force an infant to do so?

After much Libertarian theorizing, the doctor-who gets paid actual money to treat mental patients decided that since an unchanged diaper could cause disease, he had the right to clean the kid’s rear end.

But we can’t take this too far, he warned. He could not wipe his unwilling child’s nose because a snotty nose wasn’t dangerous. After all, we hadn’t have the right to wipe our next-door neighbor’s nose ...

This sounds, I know, like something from the Planet Zucchini, but it is straight out of the platform of the Libertarian Party, “the party of principle.” Some principle. Like socialists, the LP seeks to abolish parental authority. “Children are human beings,”saysthe LP,“and, as such, have all the rights of human beings.” In the Libertarian view, only the “initiation of force” is immoral. Everything else is acceptable, for adults and children.

That’s why the LP endorses the right to run away from home: “Children have the right to seek other guardians who place a higher value on their lives.”There must be no laws “forcing children” of any age ‘’to remain in the custody of their parents against their will.”

The LP also advocates “the repeal of all laws regarding consensual sexual relations” regardless of age, “all laws regulating or prohibiting the possession, use, sale, production, or distribution of sexually explicit material” involving adults or children, all laws against the televising of child and other “‘pornography”’ (their plat-

form puts the word in quotes), and all laws that restrict “children from engaging in voluntary exchanges of goods, services, or information regarding human sexuality.”

In the LP’s ideal world, your 1 O-year-old daughter could be lured to a house and sexually molested for a pornographic film, which is then televised, and you couldn’t complain as long as she “consented.” Your eight-year-old son could be bribed away from home with toys and candy by the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and that too is fine, so long as he “consented.” The Libertarian Party does have some standards, however. It condemns “the attempts by parents” to “force children to conform” to the parents’ “religious views.”

“The world we seek to build is one where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own wayswithout interference from government or an authoritarian power,” says the Libertarian Party: the “authoritarian power” of fathers and mothers.

At any Libertarian Party gathering, the most popular political button reads “Resist Authority.” Libertarians talk about resisting the unjust authority of the state, but they are actually concerned with rebelling against the just authority of parents, community, tradition, and morality.

Authority is every bit as important to society as liberty, as the institution of he family shows, but the Libertarian Party rejects this, and thus undermines true Iiberty.

In Western civilization, children have always been entrusted to the authority of their parents. Opposed to this is the socialist view, which sees children as belonging ultimately to the state, or the Libertarian view, which sees children as legitimate victims of adult perversion. Libertarians are culturally leftwing on many issues; here they may be worse than Reds.

The Libertarian Party’s one principle, “non-initiation of force,” is fine for the rough and tumble of practical politics, but not as the only rule for society. Make it such, and spanking becomes a felony, as does what the LP platform decries as “con f i ne m e n t ” for religious instruction.

In ,1988, a good man won the Libertarian nomination for president.

But Congressman Ron Paul’s disagreements with the LP on children’s rights, abortion, feminism, Martin Luther King, and many other social issues caused a backlash among party activists, who criticized him as”too straight, too white, and too conservative.” In 1992, they will make no such mistake.

I’m a libertarian, but as a parent, I’d worry if the Libertarian Party ever won an election. Child molesters would be honored citizens; decent parents would be in jail.

A candidate for the 1992 Libertarian presidential nomination recentlyendorsed the right to engage in child pornography. You couldn’t be a Libertarian, he said, unless you concurred. And at least one LP official is also an official in NAMBLA.

Are the child-related parts of the LP platform mere ideological windsurfing? I wonder. If one were a child molester, and wanted fraternal support, where would one go? Even the Democrats would have nothing to do with you. Could this be one of the reasons that women, far more perceptive about these things than men, avoid the LP?