By Karl Denninger
The following article has been contributed by Karl Denninger and The Market Ticker.
Still think you have “freedom” eh? Still think you’re the actual parents of your children, and that you should be the ones making decisions about their lifestyle and heatlh? Or are you simply where all the liabilities reside for the decision to have them, while the choices belong to someone else — you know, like a slave?
Police have rejected criticism of their search for a five-year-old boy with a brain tumour removed from a UK hospital by his parents against medical advice.
Ashya King was found in Malaga on Saturday and his parents arrested, following an international search.
His father Brett King defended his actions in a video posted on YouTube, saying there had been a “ridiculous chase”.
Hampshire Police said medical advice was that Ashya was in “grave danger”.
The parents, it turns out, wanted their kid to be treated using a therapy not offered by the UK’s socialized medical services. Specifically, they wanted to use proton beam therapy rather than what the UK wanted to use (effectively gamma radiation.) The difference is that proton beam therapy is a more-targeted form of radiation than gamma. Both are of the same general type, and there is much dispute as to whether proton therapy is as effective in specific cancers. Then again there’s plenty of argument over whether radiation therapy actually “works” (that is, does less harm and good) in these cases to begin with.
Brain cancer sucks, by the way. The most-effective means of getting rid of a cancer is to (as you’d expect) cut it out with a knife. That’s often impossible when the growth is in the brain, and it’s ineffective when the cancer has spread, since in that case you generally can’t get it all, and if you don’t get it all you’ve only changed the time before the inevitable — and usually not by much either.
But this case, as with the case of Justina Pelletier, shows that the government believes that children are in fact their property. Let us not forget that in Justina’s case the state finally came to the conclusion that they were wrong and the parents (and their advocates in the medical system) were right. That is, they effectively admitted to kidnapping her, in retrospect.
So who went to prison for that? Nobody, and nobody will either. Justina, after a year of this, actually had custody of her formally awarded to the state.
And what is going to happen in this case? The parents have been arrested and will be extradited back to the UK and, of course, have been forcibly separated from their child.
Doesn’t this tell you exactly what sort of relationship the state recognizes — or doesn’t, as the case may be — when it comes to your children?
We’re not talking about a situation here where two parents disagree and someone has to make a decision of some kind (e.g. in the instance of a divorce.) These are both cases where an intact family disagrees with what a state actor believes about a child born to that family. As soon as that happens you discover that the state in fact has claimed ownershipof that child.
That’s utterly outrageous — but it in fact happens every day and nobody has done a thing to stop it.
This article has been contributed by Karl Denninger and The Market Ticker.
Karl is the author of Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World in which he discusses the ill-use of leverage and how it is destroying the global economy, as well as where all of this will lead. The result is ugly: the value of everything—including gold—falls, and even personal safety is at risk in a world where there is limited money even for essentials like food and fuel.
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