One of the stranger questions in economic history came from the pen of Murray Rothbard when he turned to “the difficult case of children”—do parents have the right to sell their sons and daughters? I hope that other capitalist economists were embarrassed by this question, but, in Rothbard’s defense, he was merely carrying on the thinking of his economic school.
Ludwig von Mises, the famous Austrian economist and Rothbard’s professor, wrote in his Human Action that all actions are exchanges or transactions.1 He even believed that “every action can make use of ordinal numbers” meaning that all actions were quantifiable, commensurate with a dollar value. So when Rothbard flushed out his theory, he inevitably came to the question of a father’s relationship with his son.
He determined that, “if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else.”3 In other words, you can sell your kid. But this conclusion only works if one does not believe that the child has reached full rational potential, at which point he would own himself and thus could not be sold to another. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of this understanding back in 2009, in AC v Manitoba, which determined that if minors can demonstrate mature and independent judgment— and have shown they understand the potential consequences of their decision—their views about medical treatments ought to be respected. This proved an efficacious law last year, when a 14 year old boy named Max sued his father Clark for…
