Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.

Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.

Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.

No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and volume of their children’s social contact on a platform like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for me.

Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?

Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?

Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.