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You have to wonder if that is why the kid was so rough, he knew he'd get away with it and at most incur "Now, Johnny, that wasn't very nice" from mom and dad.
Though the "spanking is child abuse!" set would be horrified by that. It's a tricky balance to get right; sometimes kids do need a swat on the behind at the right time to steer them off the track of being little bullies. But that's not an excuse for beating kids because you're a terrible parent, and sometimes there's really something psychologically wrong with the kid that needs professional intervention, not just a good smack.
With two kids of my own now I get the tricky balance. I was not really ever spanked, mostly cuz you didn't need to spank me to punish me. You could tell me I did something bad or wrong and I would feel terrible. My brother apparently laughed at my parents when they spanked him. They found it far more effective to take away the toys he liked.
So there are people in this world like you who do not necessarily need violence to stay in line, and then there are people who do. You have personal experience of this.
I imagine that there are millions of the 2nd kind (violence-needing), and that you would get a lot of them in an open-border territory. And the more of those you would get, the less likely you would be to attract the 1st kind.
What's your plan?
None of the stories here imply violence as a solution. It was messing me up. It was ineffective on my brother. And the solution to the parent's friend kid was ultimately separation. The spanking merely brought about that separation, its unclear if the spanking would have worked long term.
But yes, I agree some people need violence to stay in line. Nothing else will really work. They have short time horizons, low to no empathy, or some form of psychopathy. And there are even some people where I think even extreme violence will not work.
Me? I'm not that smart. I like the work of David and Pattri Friedman on these types of problems. I also think the impulse to structure societies into some perfect form is a statist impulse, and something I try to avoid. I don't know if there is a perfect solution. I do feel pretty certain that the current solution is not very good for a multitude of reasons. And those reasons are my entire belief set and political experience for the last two decades, so not a short list or something I've not thought about a lot. It just feels too long to go into here.
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