FOUR
Posted on: February 11, 2019 at 12:05:38 CT
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Four
Children are our greatest natural resource.
There’s another high-sounding, popular, but dangerous expression. Herbert Hoover said it almost a century ago.
Yes, children are great. We’ve all been one (and some people still are). But if you use “ours” to speak of children, I hope you’re referring to yours, not mine or anybody else’s.
The point is that children are not collectively owned. They are created by parents, who lovingly exercise a guardian relationship over these new human beings until they are of age to be independent adults. And they are not a “natural resource” to be mined or exploited or pushed around.
The idea that children are an amorphous blob to be deployed for “the greater good” has been used to justify the most awful collectivist disasters.
This is not a quibble. The idea that children are an amorphous blob to be deployed for “the greater good” has been used to justify the most awful collectivist disasters, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Soviet Union.
I’m sure Herbert Hoover didn’t mean it that way when he said “Children are our greatest natural resource,” but it would have been nice if someone had shouted, “Stop right there, Mr. President! My child belongs to no one but me, and someday he will belong only to himself. That’s what freedom is all about. Please don’t think of my child as your natural resource.”