Parenting & Family Quote by Tom G. Palmer

Palmer’s line is a deliberately sharp piece of liberal paternalism: it defends guardianship not as a power grab but as a last-resort safety device for people who, in his framing, lack the capacity for accountable choice. The phrasing “necessary” does a lot of work. It aims to normalize guardianship as functional infrastructure, like seat belts for civic life, rather than an exceptional intrusion. That’s the intent: to carve out a narrow, principled exception to the ideal of individual autonomy.

The subtext is more combustible. By pairing “children” with “abnormal adults,” Palmer invites a boundary-drawing exercise: who gets counted as capable, and who gets treated as a ward? “Abnormal” is the loaded hinge. It sounds clinical, but it smuggles in cultural judgments about disability, mental illness, cognitive decline, addiction, and even nonconforming behavior. The line reassures readers who fear chaos: someone must be in charge when rational agency fails. It also risks echoing histories where “incapacity” was a convenient label for disenfranchisement, institutionalization, and coercion.

Contextually, as an educator associated with libertarian-leaning arguments about responsibility and consent, Palmer is likely trying to protect the concept of agency by acknowledging its limits. The quote works rhetorically because it offers a clean moral syllogism - responsibility requires competence; incompetence requires guardianship - while leaving the hardest questions offstage: Who decides incompetence? How reversible is that status? What safeguards prevent “protection” from turning into control?