I am not about to recycle some political theories from the dustbin of history. I have little in common with the 19th century dreamers who believed that with the abolition of states, mankind would enter a paradise of mutual aid.

Furthermore, I have nothing in common with the labor union activists of the 20th century who seriously believed that private property is the sole culprit for everything evil in this world.

I feel closer to Thomas Hobbes, who (in the 17th century) reasoned that the function of state power is to prevent and control physical violence among the members of a society, and that, apart from that, as he stated in his Leviathan: "Liberty dependeth on the Silence of the Law."

We no longer live in the 17th century, and in spite of the common ground cited above, I'm not just a Hobbesist.

I do even have something in common with anarchists. Like anarchists, I cherish a maximum of personal freedom in an environment of a maximum of personal safety.

Because I am in favor of a maximum of personal freedom, I prefer much silence of the law when it comes to my private affairs.

In this sense, I want less state.

But it is a common fallacy to equate less state with a weak state. Because only a strong state can, so to speak, afford to be less state… which means, to grant its citizens a high degree of personal freedom.

This sounds like an anachronism, but isn't one.

For a strong state can keep the peace, often on an ad hoc-basis, without having to regulate about everything. A weak state, on the contrary, will have to struggle first with legislative procedures. Because laws are formulated to deal not with a specific case but a general abstract, they typically apply to many more, and different, situations than lawmakers initially had in mind. But once laws are on the books, they typically linger on, continuously limiting the personal freedom of citizens for which they were initially not meant.

To give an example. In the US, after the murder of a child by a repeat sex offender, a law had been passed that requires convicted sex offenders to register with the local police which then includes his address in a public list of sex offenders. Yes, obviously, the state has a duty to protect children from being murdered by sex offenders. But the law, in the general language in which it has been passed, applies to many more people than potential child murderers. To 19-year old males, for example, who have been convicted of having had sex with a 17-year old girlfriend. The law, in its general terms, does not sufficiently differentiate, and could not, even if it were much more elaborate. For there is so much diversity in human behavior that appropriateness would require a special law for almost every case.

It is the same, for example, with drug laws. A schoolyard dealer may sell some heroin to a girl who has never tried the stuff before, and gets hooked. Or he may sell the same amount of heroin to a person who is terminally ill of cancer but does not just want the pain to go away, but also still experience some kicks in life. The police and the courts would probably apply the same law in both cases.

That a state has to deal with both cases entirely by designing laws for them is both an indication of weak state and more state. A strong state could afford to deal with both cases on an executive level, which would mean less state for all the rest of a society.

Therefore, our best bet for a maximum of personal freedom (that's what anarchists dream of, isn't it) in an environment of a maximum of personal safety is a strong state and a strong government that is guided by a sound ideology of granting its citizens a maximum of personal freedom.

Many of the laws that are passed to presumably protect young people actually rather serve the purpose of controlling them.

This is especially true for laws that do not allow young people to work and earn money on their own. For young people who opt out of their biological families, the choices for earning money legally are so restricted that the only alternatives to returning home are theft, prostitution, and drug dealing.

Laws that prohibit youngsters to earn a living outside of their families thus are instruments of pressure in the hands of parents and the state.

The same is the case for laws that do not allow young people to legally enter into contracts on their own. Young people who opt out of their biological families cannot rent a house or apartment; they have nowhere to stay, and thus have no alternative to living on the streets.

Some young people have good parents, and others have bad parents. Good parents recognize that from puberty, young people have a great impulse for designing their own lives. Parents have to understand this, and they have to withdraw from the lives of their children who develop their own personalities.

The worst parents are those who enforce their decisions upon their children who are growing up, against the will of their children.

Many young people during and beyond puberty are inclined to run away. Often, this inclination is legitimate. The will of young people ought to be respected. It is not correct to dismiss their wishes for designing their lives by themselves, claiming that young people are immature.

The campaign of the US government against child prostitution is hypocritical. The US government (and the legislative branch which it controls) itself is partially responsible for child prostitution and youth crime in the US, as well as for the fact that many young people enter the drug trade. The US government and legislature are partially responsible because they have shut down so many other options for young people to earn a living and to be adults.

And through the NGOs that are aligned with the US government, and through which the US has great influence on other countries, either directly or indirectly through the UN, the same policies are exported to other countries, even those where traditionally, young people between 14 and 18 or between 16 and 18 were considered young adults, not children.

As the UN are located on US soil, American NGOs have an easy time, lobbying, and virtually controlling, UN branches that concern themselves with cultural or educational policies such as the UNESCO and UNICEF. Strict standards against young people below the age of 18 (who are uniformly defined as children) have originated at these UN bodies and other US-based international organizations in which, typically, feminists and Christian fundamentalists are strongly represented.

Only in the world of drugs, prostitution, and crime, count 15-year olds (and even 13-year olds) as fully emancipated members of a community. Everywhere else, they are just children.

My proposal that young people from the age of 14 are given more opportunities to earn money on their own (and to prove that they are adults) has been replied to with the remark that young people should first avail of an education before starting to work.

But this reply reflects an old-fashioned idea about education as something a young person obtains as a block, before entering the workforce.

By contrast, I believe that anybody should be given the opportunity to further his or her education until one's death. I advocate that people start working early, so they will have an opportunity to earn money (outside of the foul career options of prostitution, crime, and drug dealing).

But I do not mean that young people should work full-time, unless this is their clear wish. Young people should have the option of working part-time, and of furthering their education part-time.

Actually, I advocate such an approach not only for youngsters, but for virtually anybody (including myself; I am well beyond 50, and I am still enrolled in university courses).

Fortunately, there is an ever increasing number of "open" universities for which no formal prior education has to be proven, and more and more universities offer distance programs (though an "open" university with campus classes should be chosen in most cases).

My point is: much of youth crime has its origin in the fact that teenagers from the age of 14 are still considered children, and treated as children, while the one thing they really, really want to be, is: adults.

Give them genuine opportunities to earn money, and treat them as young adults, and you will be surprised to what extent they will start showing responsible behavior. The traditional laws of many countries other than the US reflected this assessment in that they conferred the status of being "adult" upon every teenager, no matter how young, if he or she entered into a marriage.

Of course, such traditions undermine the agenda of feminazis and Christian zealots who crusade to have any person under the age of 18 perceived and treated as child, no matter whether the age is 7 or 17. But the real concern of feminists and Christian zealots is not the welfare of people under 18.

For both feminazis and Christian zealots, to keep those who are not yet 18 under control, allows them to mold their characters and to convert them to their ideologies. This should be recognized for what it is: an egoistic interest to have offspring who reflect their parents' preferences.

It is futile to argue that per se, parents know what is best for their children. Fact is that some parents know what is good for their children, and others do not. While good parents will make wise suggestions as to what their growing up children should do (and this should be encouraged), young individuals should have more rights to decide on their own.

Even when some of the decisions young people may take seem wrong to their parents, they may in fact be much more appropriate for the world a younger generation lives in than the outmoded templates their parents believe in.

I am not an utopist. States and nationwide governments are needed. They cannot just be abolished. (please note: the term “state” is used in its international meaning, referring to the ruling structure of a country; not in its US meaning, referring to a federal state of the US).

The principal function of states is to keep the peace between the members of a society, and to make a society as safe as possible for all who live in it. Furthermore, states have the obligation of defending a society against outside aggression. Beyond that, states should involve themselves as little as possible in the lives of the people.

Even states led by Marxist-Leninist governments have come to realize that a Communist economy, entirely managed by the state, just doesn't work as well as one based on private initiative.

Just as with respect to economic activities, some basic adjustments should also made to the way, crimes and settlements are handled. It may not be obvious but until now, the legal systems of modern states are based on the archaic idea that punishment primarily serves a god, or an abstract entity, whose social order was violated, and not the injured party.

There is no other explanation for the fact that even in cases where the perpetrator of a crime and the victim of a crime were to find a settlement, the state still insists on meting out a punishment.

In contrast to current legal practice, I hold that when the victim and the perpetrator of a crime can agree on a compensation (usually a payment, but both parties should be free to agree on other measures), then the state should give up a claim to punish a perpetrator.

When there is no agreement, the state would impose a punishment in accordance with pre-set ceilings, jus as in current legal systems.

If the maximum sentence for car theft is set as 5 years imprisonment, a victim may ask a court to have this punishment implemented. The court would decide whether there are circumstances that warrant a lower punishment.

But if the victim were satisfied with a compensation payment that is 10 times the value of the car (or anything the two parties agree on, then this punishment would be valid. In such a case, the state may, however, impose a charge on the perpetrator to recover investigation costs.

A society in which punishments would be victim-oriented, different standards would evolve in different strata of this society, and in the interest of personal freedom, I would welcome this.

The essence is that while the state would set limits of maximal punishments, everything below that would depend on what is considered appropriate in different strata of a society, or by victims in different strata of society.

In cases where the victim and the perpetrator of a crime can agree on a settlement, the function of a court should end with having established the guilt of the perpetrator.

In practice, would the proposed alternative legal theory mean that rich people would just pay up and walk free, and poor people can't? Would such a system favor the wealthy? Not necessarily. In many cases, it would mean that rich perpetrators would pay much more compensation than poorer perpetrators. This would even be more consistent with principles of social justice than the current practice, which typically imposes the same punishment on the rich and the poor.

Would the proposed system mean leaner punishments? Not necessarily either. If an injured party feels that only imprisonment will settle the score, then it shall be imprisonment, with the length of a prison term decided by a judge, Justas is current practice).

I do want to point out that my idea is quite different from the Islamic concept of blood money to settle murder cases. In murder cases, no redress is available in favor of the victim, so that in murder cases, the state should always impose a strict punishment.

Current legal theory forces its standards uniformly on all members of a society. This means that even the consensual activities of a group of people may be prosecuted because it violates state standards. A blatant example is the execution of consenting homosexuals in Iran. Another the prosecution of those who engage in consensual oral or anal sex ("against the order of nature") in Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar.

Western countries are not free of laws that punish consensual interactions between their citizens. They are not even free of laws that regulate what a person does alone, with his own body. If a person grows marihuana or poppy in a flower pot and smokes it himself, he may be severely punished in the US, even though there is no victim in the legal sense.

People within a society should be entitled to choose their own consensual lifestyle, without being restricted by the state. Then, different groups of people within one country would live very different lives. This is the essence of freedom.

I am aware of the fact that current political systems are unlikely to put such a new legal theory into practice, and to be able to then to fine-tune it so that it will indeed guarantee for a country’s population a new dimension of personal freedom. The political force that most likely could handle the task would be a elitist single state party, strongly guided by a sound ideology in accordance to which granting optimal personal freedom to a country’s citizens would be the primary goal of political rule (in addition to providing safety).