Tearing Families Apart

People think that one of the worst aspects of chattel slavery in the USA and its colonial antecedents was how the slave owners tore apart families, sometimes wrenching children from their parents’ arms and separating family members forever. What could be more horrible?

Yet, quite recently, the Trump administration deliberately undertook to tear children from their parents’ arms as a means of terrorizing would-be migrants to the USA. And only a few of us even bothered to take note of this atrocity, much less to denounce with all our might those who carried out these monstrous actions.

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Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.