“Ethan Crumbley,” Reuters reported in December, “was 15 years old when he opened fire at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021,” killing four and wounding seven. At 17, per the Reuters story, Crumbley was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

At the times of both the shootings and the sentencing, Crumbley was considered a “child” by the state of Michigan. He couldn’t legally drink. He couldn’t legally vote. He couldn’t enlist in the armed forces, or get married, without parental consent. And he couldn’t legally buy a gun.

Crumbley became an “adult” in the state’s eyes only when it concerned charging,  trying, convicting, and sentencing him for murder.

But then a curious thing happened. The state waved its magic wand again and his instant “adulthood” reversed itself, Benjamin Button style. He became a “child” once more.

Why? Because if Ethan was an adult at the time he committed his crime, his mother wasn’t responsible for his mental health status, medical treatment needs, or ownership or possession of firearms.

Since the state wanted to convict Jennifer Crumbley of involuntary manslaughter for her son’s crimes,  Ethan Crumbley had to retroactively stop being the adult he’d previously been magically transformed into for purposes of the prior case.

On February 6, a jury agreed with the state that Ethan Crumbley is Schrodinger’s Child — simultaneously minor child and responsible adult inside his cell,  fully becoming whichever one of those things the state needs him to be when there’s a prosecution in progress.

There are many problems with legally defining “childhood” and “adulthood” on the basis of drawing a number out of a hat. Some 15-year-olds are more mature than others — and, for that matter, sometimes more mature than some 45-year-olds.

Letting prosecutors arbitrarily drop the random number in favor of a more convenient number doesn’t fix any of those problems. It just adds to them.

If Ethan Crumbley had previously been allowed to take, and had passed, some kind of competency test to unlock his rights to vote, drink, purchase and possess guns, marry, and enlist, trying him “as an adult” for his crimes would have been reasonable.

If Ethan Crumbley was a child for all those purposes, it would likewise be reasonable to assert some measure of parental responsibility for  supervisory failures culminating in those crimes.

But it should be one or the other, not whichever pleaseth the crown at any particular moment.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Europe Is Upset With Biden On Trade” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal on January 30, noting that the continent’s “trade troubles with the Trump administration” continue under a successor who “has kept trade barriers in place.”

Readers who turned to page 8 learned that such woes aren’t simply the result of inaction, inertia or insufficiency, but that “in matters of international economics, Biden shared some of Trump’s worldview.” Sometimes, an opened door to trade was paired with a newly closed window, such as replacing “the tariffs Trump slapped on European steel and aluminum” with “more modest fees that nonetheless cost European metal exporters hundreds of millions of dollars last year.” Senator Joe Manchin proposed strings on a tax credit to discourage using car parts from countries unless they were “free-trade partners,” unaware this would disqualify imports from Europe as well as his intended target, China.

The party of Jefferson has reversed its founder’s call in the First Inaugural Address for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Meanwhile, Ron Paul’s 2007 book A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship goes unread in a Trump-dominated GOP.

Even radical third-party presidential candidate Cornel West, denouncing the nation-state’s “monopoly on violence” and the ideology of nationalism as “an impediment, an obstacle that doesn’t allow us to see how nation-states are connected” in an interview with The Internationalist, ignores its role in preventing mutually beneficial deals, the opposite of what he denounces as “predatory capitalism, obsession with profit, squeezing out of nature, workers and anything you can touch in order to generate some kind of commercial and market value.”

It’s not like a free-market platform in 2024 is as quixotic as, say, the Prohibition Party’s in 1936. Trump-era trade wars have taken a bite out of the bottom lines of iconic American brands from Ford and Harley-Davidson to Apple (as well as newspapers printed on pulp from Canada).

A twenty-first century during which Hillary Clinton will only vouch for a “hemispheric common market, with open trade” behind closed doors could learn from the populists of the nineteenth. The movement against England’s regressive Corn Laws in the early 1800s, as historian Allen Guelzo observes, “saw in protectionism one of the chief props of an agricultural aristocracy.” West calling “a war of all against all” economy “market-driven” obscures how today’s aristocratic incumbents fear market competition. The Emma Goldman lauded by West for having “championed the struggle for freedom and justice” did so in camaraderie with the followers of Henry George, whose 1886 volume Protection Or Free Trade was one long argument for the latter.

A renewal of such popular pressure, including among those who can only vote in the USA with their dollars, can help make sure that politicians will think twice about assuming that trade walls are a winning strategy.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Everyone should be upset with Biden (and Trump) on trade” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, February 6, 2024
2. “Biden, Trump trade walls a losing strategy” by Joel Schlosberg, Rocky Mount, North Carolina Telegram, February 9, 2024
3. “Everyone should be upset with Biden and Trump on trade” by Joel Schlosberg, The  Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, February 9, 2024

For the second year in a row, Florida’s  state legislature has an “end of life options” — or “medical aid in dying” — bill before it.

SB 1642 / HB 561 would “allow” terminally ill patients, diagnosed as having less than six months to live, to “request” (and doctors to prescribe) medication to end their lives “peacefully” instead of waiting for the prognosis to run its course.

Although this partial and minimal accommodation of patients’ rights should pass with a veto-proof majority faster than the TV cameras pan to Taylor Swift when Travis Kelce scores a touchdown, it’s probably deader than its beneficiaries will be in, say, six months.

Since it’s unlikely to pass, and since nothing I write is likely to change that, I’d like to turn to a simpler question:

Why do we tolerate politicians claiming that our lives belong to them and that whether, when, and how those lives end should be their decision rather than ours?

Nature (and human nature) preclude, at least for the moment, the choice to live forever. Illness, accident, and crime cut lives short every day despite the perfectly normal desire to continue living.

But the desire to NOT continue living, for whatever reason, brings up a choice that rightfully belongs to all mentally competent adults. Entirely. Completely. Without exception.

I might not agree that you’re making a good choice, but it’s your choice to make. Not mine. Not the legislature’s. Not your doctor’s. Not even your loved ones’. Yours and yours alone.

Attempting to forbid that choice is evil in all cases, and especially evil when the victims of that prohibition are going to die shortly, know they are going to die shortly, and are likely in considerable pain and unable to do the things that make further life enjoyable while they await the inevitable.

While the Florida bill represents what one might call “a good start,” it’s flawed because it builds on the faulty and morally abhorrent idea that you are property, owned by the state, rather than a free individual who’s responsible for your own life and entitled to decide whether or not that life continues.

Instead of asking politicians to “allow” us to “request” limited control over such matters, we should ask ourselves why we “allow” those politicians to exercise such control over us in the first place.

And we should take back that control and that choice instead of begging for exceptions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY