I remember hearing a quote to the effect of,
"buying and selling children should be allowed on the free market".
I thought it was Milton Friedman or some other economist. The usual search engines have returned nothing useful. Pretty sure I first seen it on a twitch stream, maybe Hasan or the Serfs, but I am not sure.
Thanks in advance.
It’s Murray Rothbard:
Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children.
Friedman's assessment was more moderate:
To put this in a different and what may seem more callous way, children are at one and the same time a consumer good and potentially responsible members of society. The freedom of individuals to use their economic resources as they want includes the freedom to use them to have children – to buy, as it were, the services of children as a particular form of consumption. But once this choice is exercised, the children have a value in and of themselves and have a freedom of their own that is not simply an extension of the freedom of the parents.
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/215141/full
As far as I can tell, this does make the parent, in the act of producing offspring, the economic equivalent of a yeoman in his analysis, which is kind of funny (because the child is described effectively as a "consumer good" where the producer and "consumer" are the same individual).
