Letter: Government shouldn’t be in business of child care

Thursday, Oct. 30, 1997 | 10:17 a.m.

To say that the "government" must take care of children is to transfer responsibility for those children from those who created them to everyone else (or at least the productive, who pay taxes).

I, for one, do not accept this responsibility. I do not have any children. If I did have children, I would consider it my job to care for them -- either through staying home with them or hiring a private facility to take care of them. I would not expect my neighbors to drop their interests and responsibilities to do it for me. I would be even more horrified by the idea of them being forced, by Big Government, to do it for me.

The government has no right to hold a gun to my neighbor's head to make him take care of my kids -- nor vice versa. And no matter what the politicians say, forcing people to give up a portion of their earnings to pay for everyone's child care is exactly what this amounts to.

The Clintons' idea of nationalized child care -- just like their earlier, failed proposal for nationalized health care -- rests on the premise of collectivism. Collectivism means that everybody is responsible for everybody else -- and, by implication, that nobody is responsible for himself. This is nonsense. It makes much more sense for me to be responsible for myself, and my neighbor to be responsible for himself.

Even more important, no government has the moral right to force me to be responsible for my neighbor. To do so is a violation of my individual rights under the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson did not fight for the values of "life, liberty and the pursuit of other people's happiness." Individual rights -- the rights upon which all other rights depend -- refer to the right to pursue one's own happiness.

President and Mrs. Clinton, for the hundredth time: Please, leave us alone!

Michael J. Hurd, Psychologist