Imagine a child is born to 2 loving and hard working, but basically poor, parents.  They cannot afford to buy accident or life insurance.  Imagine the parents then die in a car accident and that the child is then alone in the world (no grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.).  It seems clear that the child does not deserve his plight.  It is nonetheless, not clear how to argue that any specific person has a duty to the child to take care of him.  Some thus believe that the government has a duty to take care of the child–though perhaps the duty is not owed to the child, but to society-at-large (or …).  The thought here may be that the government is something like an insurer of last resort so that if no specific person has a duty to take care of the child, the government must step in.  This position is not at all unreasonable–it is essentially the government interfering to protect the child from harms that would befall it should no one step up to care for it.  An alternative seems to be complete reliance on charitable organizations to step in to care for the child (perhaps getting it adopted).  Frankly, as a matter of ideal theory, this also strikes me as not at all unreasonable.  We'd have an organization like the Red Cross or Salvation Army or St. Jude's that people would know they could call if they knew of a child in this situation–in the same way that people now call the police or DFCS or such.  The latter option has an advantage over the former in that the former may increase the ability of the government to interfere with families in ways that it should not.  But that points to an advantage of the former over the latter: sometimes, we want to be able to use force to interfere with the family: cases of child abusers, for example.  It seems unlikely (though perhaps not impossible) that a charitable organization would have the authority to do that.

The point in a nutshell: I want children to be protected. 

The question: What is the best way to accomplish that?  I mean this in 2 ways and would be happy for responses to either or both: (a) as a matter of ideal theory what should be the answer; put differently, assuming all citizens comply with the principles of justice (whatever they are), what would those principles have us do?  Put differently, what is the ideal principle of justice regarding children? and (b) forget about theory; what should we do in our world?