THE STATE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND:

Conscience is a flexible thing, so the authorities who blocked a desperate parental bid to risk an untested therapy that just might have helped their child are presumably sleeping soundly with no bad dreams.

But it was a wicked abuse of the state’s coercive power to prevent the parents from trying their best for their child, and it should strengthen the determination of everyone who cares about human liberty to fight the inexorable, gratuitous growth of states that fail at the most basic jobs (like educating children in public schools) but who endlessly seek to expand their ‘competencies’ into new and more challenging fields.

We need states that stick to their knitting: that perform a few core functions efficiently and well, rather than the current set up of slovenly, meddlesome government that fails at basic tasks (like keeping the drinking water safe in Flint) while interfering mindlessly in the most intimate dramas of family life.

The worse a government is at performing its basic tasks, the more energy it seems to spend on virtue-signalling and nannying.