This is profoundly unbelievable. Professor Melissa Harris-Perry of Tulane and MSNBC fame wants us to start treating children as property of the state.In an MSNBC promo spot — a promo spot for a supposed news channel — Melissa Harris-Perry says:

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had a private notion of children, your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children.So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s we start making better investments.”

So kids belong to whole communities? Didn’t we fight a war back in the 1800s to prove that people weren’t owned by the state or anyone else, but were, in fact, people? Seriously?But take that out of it. This is amazingly stupid commentary. All of us who own property (real property, not children) pay property taxes to fund a public education system to educate our children. We have democratically elected school boards to make the decisions on how to collectively educate our kids to common, state approved standards.It is failing spectacularly. And I suspect that the tangible efforts to improve it, from neutering teachers unions to giving parents choices in where to send their children, are opposed by Melissa Harris-Perry.I never thought I’d see the day when self-styled progressives advocated the state owning the people.Relevant today is a good quote from Margaret Thatcher directly related to this insipid notion of state ownership of the children.

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the Government’s job to cope with it. “I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.” “I’m homeless, the Government must house me.” They’re casting their problems on society. And you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbors. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

I await the MSNBC Lean Forward commentary that we could cure hunger if only we’d start mass production of Soylent Green.——*Title changed because I had totally forgotten about this and it is too good to not use.