Some Things that Definitely Are Broken With the State

[prog_expat]

Oi. Where to begin?

It should be apparent to anybody that knows me even a little that I'm not a "drown it in the bathtub" sort when it comes to government. Fix it, don't sabotage it or destroy it outright. While there are a lot of things wrong with government in the US, I don't see us at a point where it's time to douse the whole thing in gasoline and light a match.

• The War on Drugs
• The War on Terror
• America's warmongering obsession, of which "The War on Something a War Could Never Solve" is a symptom

(The War on Poverty desperately needs to be re-branded, but the basic goal of eliminating poverty is a good one.)

Taking somebody's child away because he used a drug that is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, which he could have legally drunk by the gallon or smoked by the box in front of his child is so irrational that the only fitting qualifier is "insane". That CPS went so far as to stigmatize him as an incompetent parent or just a straight-up bad person and ignore his warnings regarding possible mistreatment of his daughter by her foster parents until he put his foot down and risked being thrown in jail by refusing to let her return is ludicrous.

I'm not advocating throwing CPS out - there are some people who are dangers to their own children and absolutely should not be allowed to continue raising them, the Western notion of children as the personal property of their parents be damned. Indeed, I think the system is woefully underfunded and, as a result, understaffed and undertrained and the solution is to allocate more money to them so they can hire more caseworkers to take the load and implement more extensive training programs. Giving the caseworkers the tools they need to do better background checks and more quickly respond to concerns about foster families is what's needed, not gutting CPS for no better reason than it's a government agency.

Of course, ending this process of injecting more children into the system because their parents did nothing more than use a socially frowned-on substance would lessen the workload to begin with.