- Freedom from the power of others starts with rights, and the first right is not about how we act, but rather our creation – children’s birthrights that determine whether they are empowered by the conditions in which they are born and raised, and their level of empowerment and influence relative to others in the world. Freedom is not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but rather the true border of being relatively self versus other determining, and controlling who – via creation – we actually have to share the world with. It’s about who actually has influence over you, climatologically, financially, pedagogically, etc. When you fear your fellow citizens, have real influence over your political representatives, suffer in human induced heat waves, cannot access nature, and are controlled by employers, you are not free.
- That means our first obligations are not to written constitutions, governments, or the wealthy, but to the future children from whose empowerment those things derive their authority. And that starts with prioritized funding for responsible family planning, where we invest enough in each child to enable them to offset their fundamental political influence equally, relative to a neutral position. Those who reject those obligations to future children fall outside the scope of deserving legal protection because they do not offer it to others in the crucial formation of legal/power relations. They can be accused of and held accountable for reparations fraud, or denying future generations justice. How else should we frame cost/benefit systems, in the constituting of our relations with others, that make some kids billionaires and kill others?
- Do current fraud laws cover that? Remember that law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. Government and the wealthy can’t avoid liability by writing its own rules in ways that determine that liability. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people.
- How do we make this change? Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation if we are to be self-determining. How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions? If those who owe future generations for the fraud described above are willing to tell the truth, we urge them to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.
- Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and by individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination that triggered a climate crisis killing millions of children of color while enriching their own kids. The move took the idea of freedom, or autonomy, outside of one’s measurable share in one’s democracy. The move, fundamentally, enabled the conversion of freedom to wealth. This created a fictitious baseline for cost and benefit analysis and national legitimacy, one that has fundamentally driven the climate crisis by exploiting rather than including and measurable empowering, children as they entered the world. The claims of public benefit that arise from it maintain a fantasy world that enriches mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color. This baseline has subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it, and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.
- Practically we ensure this change and those rights by entitling would-be parents to parenting delay payments, inverse to wealth and income. Given the first point above, the rights to the wealth needed for the entitlements override the rights of those currently claiming to own the wealth, in part because the owners made the wealth through unsustainable growth and loss of political equity, or the externalizing of costs that required violating children’s birthrights. There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.
