Posted 04/09/2013 06:35 PM ET
Family: An MSNBC contributor revisits the statist notion that while you gave birth to your children and feed and clothe them, they are only on loan to you by their true parent — a benevolent and all-knowing government.
Melissa Harris-Perry, an African-American professor at Tulane, has endorsed the concept of human ownership by the state, something we thought history would teach her is a bad thing, saying in a promo for MSNBC that "we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had a private notion of children; your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children," Harris-Perry opined.
Our children? It is an idea most famously expressed in recent years by Hillary Clinton in her 1990s best-seller, "It Takes A Village," but it is hardly a new idea.
Collectivists throughout history have said that children do and should belong to the state and that if you control the children, you control the future.
One well-known collectivist echoed such sentiments when he said, "Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state. The state will take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child belongs to us already... what are you?"
So said Adolf Hitler, who founded a sate-run youth group that bore his name.
Today's statists oppose anything which puts children out of the absolute control of the state, and education is just the start.
They oppose home schooling, even though the children receive the individual attention educators tout, which is provided in a safe environment by people who genuinely love them.
Statists like Ms. Harris-Perry oppose school vouchers and school choice because that puts the decision of what children will be taught — and where — in the hands of parents. Kids are to be herded into re-education camps known as public schools where they cannot pray, pledge allegiance to God and country, but where they can get condoms and free contraceptives because the state knows better.
The state will feed your children breakfast and lunch because the state knows what they should eat. Forget about packing something in that Justin Bieber lunchbox and sending your tot off to school.
The state will send your child home till you accede to its authority. You can be pro-choice but after you choose to have a child all choices, the statists argue, belong to the state.
Many of the societal problems Harris-Perry would solve through state control are, in fact, caused by state intervention or indifference.
Is it the belief that children belong to the state that explains the states' indifference to the disintegration of the family and traditional marriage, particularly in the African-American community where the illegitimacy rate is upwards of 70%?
It disturbs liberals to insist that an intact nuclear family is the best department of health, education and welfare ever devised.
Children raised by two married parents are less likely to be raised in poverty, less likely to do drugs, less likely to be criminals later in life, and more likely to graduate from and do well in school.
National Review editor Rich Lowry recounts how former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm once told a woman, "My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do."
She said, "No, you don't."
Gramm replied, "OK: What are their names?"
We know the names of our children, Ms. Harris-Perry, and we love them more dearly than the state. You can have them when you pry them from our cold, dead, loving arms.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/040913-651296-msnbc-host-says-children-belong-to-state.htm#ixzz2QA9WJYHH