Thanks for the discussion! I don't like taking comments out of public. I have an audience who read my comments. I like to be able to link them later. The way to deal with topic changes, IMO, is stuff gets nested in a tree structure, like reddit does.
About CPS, I would like to see them do less. In particular, I think if the kid says "please leave us alone" and there isn't a lot of violence, then CPS should do nothing besides, say, give the kid their phone number. What I meant is, kids should be free to be able to go pursue other options of their own choosing, e.g. get a job and an apartment, or move in with their uncle, or there are a variety of options they could have but would currently be prevented from doing.
A friend of mine used to live with his father's girlfriend during part of highschool. They'd known each other a long time and she acted like a mother figure. No big deal. In this case, the dad was fine with it. But the dad could have said "no" even if the kid and girlfriend both wanted it. I think that sucks and violates the kids' rights. I don't think it's the case that everyone ought to always live with their parents until 16 or 18, or always ought to if the parent wants/demands it. This can happen even with young kids. Even a 4 year old might want to live with someone else, perhaps his grandparents, and might be right to prefer that and have a moral right to do it, but not be allowed to :(
Regarding pragmatic issues: yes they exist. But consider that blacks kill more people than whites in the US, and commit more of various other crimes. But we don't make any special laws and take away any privileges from blacks due to these aggregate statistics, we deal with them as individuals, which is the right thing to do. Children are people and deserved to be treated like individuals, even if it's harder than the one-size-fits-all approach. And we already have some systems for dealing with incompetent, e.g. driver's tests. It'd be good if we had better systems like that, and then as a side effect 4 year olds wouldn't get their license and also some more dangerous-driver adults wouldn't either.
With stuff like smoking and alcohol, leave it up to the family. If it's such a bad idea for the kid to drink or smoke, let the parent enforce that, not the government. And some parents don't see the problem with smoking, that's their right! I'm not saying this is totally ideal but it'd be a good start, better the parents control the kid than the government.
I agree some of this stuff is tricky and tests are problematic and often biased (driving is an area where testing works relatively well, though far from perfectly. testing to try to decide if someone is competent to decide whether to smoke or drink or not, by contrast, would work really really badly!!). I'm mainly saying there's some serious issues here and not a ton of interesting in reform. I definitely think trying to reform this stuff has less interest than animal rights.
i'm not really a fan of testing for more stuff in general. women don't have to be tested to drink or smoke or vote. blacks don't have to be. people are people. the general thing is, even if you think someone is dumb and messing up their life, that's their right, leave them alone. freedom!
How do we know if each child has happily entered into a job or is being coerced
how do you know if each woman has entered a job happily or is being coerced?
not saying this is easy, but i am saying it's an area where people should work on reform, and i absolutely believe some reforms could be figured out.
in general, life can be harsh and unfair. bad things do happen. but if you tried to have the government completely protect women from that, you'd end up oppressing from them. and a lot of protective measures would do more harm than good. same goes for children.
if you'd like to discuss more, i will reply by reddit, but i'd also recommend:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/info
this kind of thing is an ongoing/reocurring topic and we're always happy to discuss it more if someone brings it up or has a question.