This file is a single polemical libertarian essay, presented as chapter 7 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. Its scope is narrow but conceptually ambitious: Rothbard uses the fashionable prospect of “kid lib” to clarify children’s rights, parental authority, and state intervention through the categories of self-ownership and property.
What “kid lib” is supposed to be is now unclear; and I suspect it may amount to little more than the supposed “right” to kick every adult in the shins and to enjoy a guaranteed annual income to be provided by long-suffering parents and the longer-suffering taxpayer.
Rothbard’s central thesis is that neither progressive child-autonomy nor parental absolutism can solve the problem. The child is not simply an adult self-owner, because the infant lacks the practical powers of self-direction; but neither is the child an owned object. Rothbard’s main conceptual move is to shift the question from vague “freedom” to jurisdiction over property.
As in so many other fuzzy areas of demarcation of rights, as for example in the problem of “free speech” and the shouting of “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the answer to perplexing questions of rights is invariably to be found in focusing on the rights of property.
The essay’s first movement argues that parents may set rules because the child lives in their house or apartment. Curfews, household discipline, limits on noise or sexual conduct, and rules of domestic order are not, for Rothbard, violations of the child’s liberty; they are conditions of residence on someone else’s property. This is one of the essay’s starkest claims:
In moral and legal theory, there is no freedom except freedom for the property owner; and hence, such rules for the use of property are not infringements on the rights of the child.
The second movement introduces the counterweight: the child must always possess an exit right. Rothbard’s solution to the problem of when the child becomes self-owning is not a fixed age but the act of leaving parental jurisdiction. That turns “run-away freedom” into the pivotal right of the child and makes legal power to compel return a form of kidnapping.
Therefore, the child must always be free to run away; he then becomes a self-owner whenever he chooses to exercise his right to run-away freedom.
Rothbard then distinguishes parental guardianship from ownership. Infants require adult control, and he argues that parents have the primary claim because they created the child; but that claim is fiduciary rather than absolute. Parents may regulate and rear, but may not mutilate, assault, or murder. His formulation is the core of the essay’s middle section:
The role of the parent, then, is to be, not an absolute owner, but a trustee-owner or guardian, with the right to regulate the child but not to aggress against his person (as by forcibly preventing him from running away).
The essay’s moral theory is stricter than its legal theory. Parents have a moral responsibility to nurture children into independent adults through food, shelter, education, discipline, and value-formation. Rothbard attacks progressive education for confusing liberty with abdication, and he relies on Isabel Paterson’s critique of group-centered schooling to argue that children need parental authority before they can exercise individual independence. Yet he refuses to let law enforce all moral duties.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that there is a host of moral rights and duties which are properly beyond the province of the law.
In the most provocative section, Rothbard extends this logic to adoption and guardianship markets. Since neglectful parents may not be legally compelled to be good parents, he proposes that guardianship rights should be transferable. He insists this would not be slavery, because no absolute title to the child’s body is involved; only custodial jurisdiction would change hands.
In short, there would be a free market in babies and other children.
The final section widens the argument to state coercion. Compulsory schooling, certification of private schools, public-school taxation, and child-labor laws all become examples of the state overriding both parents and children. The essay’s relevance lies in how it exposes a deep tension within libertarian theory: self-ownership is easiest to defend for competent adults, but children force Rothbard to develop intermediate concepts—property jurisdiction, exit, trusteeship, moral duty without legal compulsion, and voluntary transfer of guardianship.
What is needed, above all, is the liberation of both child and parent from the domination of the State apparatus.
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