Abused Girl Doesnt Make Good Government Child Protective Services Awol - Road to the Middle Class

SORRY ABOUT that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.

Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz has a quick recap.

You see, the problem was that the caseworker Roger Moore at the child protection agency in Bedford-Stuyvesant was overwhelmed, swamped with cases. Understaffed is the word they like to use.

"I didn’t drop any balls," Moore said last week as the city reeled from the Nixzmary’s murder. The thing was, Moore just had too much on his plate. "I couldn’t cover all the cases in my area," he said.

Podhoretz goes on in the traditionally outraged tone of your average ink stained wretch.

Roger Moore is 55 years old. I hope he leads a long life so that every night, Nixzmary Brown can enter his dreams and ask him why he didn’t save her from her torture chamber of a home.

But aren’t we missing the point here? Why should anyone, least of all a conservative columnist, expect a government to do any job right except the job of extracting taxes from the citizenry?

After all, if the bureaucratic method were so great then we wouldn’t have families and churches and the little platoons that make life civilized. We would have nice bureaucratic everything, just like Plato’s tremendously succesful Republic, and Aldous Huxley’s incomparable Brave New World.

Come on folks. Let’s admit it. Government can’t protect children. Never could. Never will. What protects children is their natural married parents. And when they fail, then you hope that the little platoons, the neighbors, the church members, will feel they have the authority to intervene and stop cruelty and abuse—to do something.

But don’t ever expect the welfare state to succeed at that sort of thing.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

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Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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Drang nach Osten

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