Mowed the lawn tonight, for my evening exercise. The grass was kind of wet. I don’t like to mow wet grass as a rule, but they’re predicting more rain tomorrow and Friday, so if I don’t do it now I’ll have to hack my way through it with a machete (or my new saex), like Ramar of the Jungle.

Anybody out there remember Ramar of the Jungle? I actually recall it from re-runs, but it got re-run a lot. My primary memory of the show is how the characters would be hacking their way through the jungle (with machetes, not saexes), and somebody would pause and point off to the right or left. Then the film would (with extreme clumsiness; you could almost hear the projector clunk) switch to stock footage of lions or giraffes in the savannah. It appeared that they almost never went anywhere in the jungle except along the edge, where it bordered the savannah.

Which raised the question, why not just walk through the savannah, and save yourself all that hacking?

I wanted to link to this post by Gaius over at Blue Crab Boulevard. Partly because I think it’s a pretty clever comic pastiche of Conan Doyle, and partly because the news story that sparked it just makes me mad.

This, in my opinion, is the real problem with increasing government “compassion and care” in our lives. It put this kid’s parents in an impossible situation.

The law allows parents to do only one thing to discipline a kid – talk sternly to him. That’s it. Anything more would be child abuse and get them into Really Big Trouble.

So the only thing the neighbor who found the kid a nuisance could do, in a situation where Stern Talks weren’t working, was report him to the police.

And the police have only one weapon – they put people in jail. Which is what they did with this kid. It was insane, and I’ll bet everyone involved knew it was insane. But the law – the law intended to protect the child – left them with no other option.

This is what happens when the government becomes the parent. The world is full of horror stories about traditional families that abused and mistreated children (I have a story like that of my own). But that’s how freedom works. You get a small percentage of excellent homes, a large middle of middling homes, and a small percentage at the bottom of very bad stuff.

But when the government raises the kids, Churchill’s description of economic systems kicks in. He said Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.

Traditional families are an unequal distribution of good nurturing. But government parenting is the equal distribution of dysfunction. Has anybody raised in a government institution ever grown up well-adjusted?