Gabriel Fernandez: A Social Failure

When people believe they are being empathetic when they suggest an increase in government agencies is a good direction towards protecting and providing for the vulnerable, they do not realize that their good nature is being exploited.

If you watch “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” on Netflix, you witness the glaring issue with public social programs as they are implemented now. In this, child protection agencies, including the police, are repeatedly witness to the horrific abuse of a small child which leads, ultimately, to his violent death at the hands of his own mother and stepfather. They not only do nothing to protect this child, but deny any responsibility, and do everything in their power to protect the agency from any accountability or change.

This is not a unique issue with a singular agency; it is a natural consequence of asking others to use your money to buy you services. It is not unlike hiring someone to buy you groceries, except they can force you to pay them, and they are friends with the grocery store. It is reasonable to expect that they will buy the cheapest items, keep some for themselves, and work out deals with the grocery store so that their own groceries are cheaper, all at your expense.

Although this is a hard parallel to liken to child protective services, the truth it, it is a supplier and you are the consumer; you are buying protection for the children in our society. And without financial accountability or competition, these suppliers will always slide towards the lowest level of service for the maximum cost, as this is the easiest way for them to acquire your money.

If we look at child protective services as a consumable and then compare it to the innovation of the private sector, the mind is boggled. Imagine the progress mobile phones have made in the last decade – from flip phones with small grey screens, to full computers that we can use our fingers to control. This innovation is not a result of good intentions or human empathy – it is a result of the natural impulse within humans to succeed, to compete, to ascend.

Now try to apply this level of innovation to child protection – neither you or I are trained in this, but we can quickly contemplate innovative ideas such as daily check-ins with phones provided to vulnerable children, responsive online sites that allow schools and teachers and doctors to quickly notify agencies of issues, or databases that quickly match vulnerable children removed from homes to suitable foster homes in extreme cases, to name a few.

These are easy innovations that in the private sector would be quickly implemented by companies vying for government contracts. Instead, the abuse and murder of small, little creatures persists as your empathy and tax dollars are consumed by bureaucratic socialism.

Libertarianism is not an ideology for anarchists, drug addicts, or capitalists. It is an ideology of empathy.

 

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