What is the Cato Institute’s mission?
The vision of the Cato Institute is a free and open society in which liberty allows every individual to pursue a life of prosperity and meaning in peace.
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Concentrations of wealth and power in the Twentieth Century used child inequity to subvert the civil rights movement. Those same entities, including philanthropic funders, in the nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now using media, decoy nonprofits, celebrities, and universities, as well as politicians and government agencies, to create a fantasy world of equitable family planning, green environmental sustainability and social justice impact that is being vastly undone every day as children enter the world beneath the minimum of what they are owed. These entities are literally using wealth made at deadly cost to the values they claimed to further, wealth that is defended by the violence of the state, to engage in reparations fraud and drown out the voices of the victims.
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For decades Fair Start members were employed by and worked with such entities, and we benefitted at deadly cost to others by omitting information about the fundamental harm we were causing, and in a way that enriched mostly white children and killed mostly children of color. We now work to identify those doing this – using this fraudulent standard, especially the most influential, and preempt or overcome them. We urge them to admit the same and repair the harm of claiming to do good work that was simultaneously being undone because there were no functional protections for infants entering the world and the animals and ecologies with whom they interact.
There is no way to be free without this public and universal truth and repair process of communicating, and our taking only the equity we all deserve so we can self-determine and make our own choices, rather than determine and choose for others. It is physically impossible to be obligated as a political equal without doing this because there is no more basic system of valuation. Where else would self-determining or constitutive relations come from?
The nature of our environment, and of human reproduction, makes freedom a very specific praxis.
Not supporting preemptive children’s right to a measurably fair start in life pushes one outside of a legitimate, or inclusive, system of social obligation, which means each of us owe those outside of it as much protection as they extend to children entering the world. Is that harsh to say? What sort of person would let millions die in an ecological crisis they did not cause because we did not take the measures needed to move the wealth those millions need to live?
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Take Action. Urge Cato’s lead to answer these questions:
How does Cato account for children entering on the values they claim to further? If they did not account, does that mean they spent more on events and travel than furthering their mission? Instead of accounting, could they be free riding on generational, racial, national, and other positionalities and privileges? Do they assume the legitimacy of enabling the powerful over the vulnerable?
Fact: To be self versus other determining, we must orient from an overriding obligation to ensure no child should be born beneath the line or threshold of empowerment that this accounting provides. The line can be seen as a mirror to divisions in apartheid-based regimes, where the most influential who do not admit the omissions and harms described herein and take action to erase divisions by moving kids over into empowerment can be targeted for leaving those kids in inequity. In this case getting all children above the line unifies rather than divides.
