Child discipline

It seems to me that children in today's day and age are rather spoiled, impolite, and rebellious. As I work around kids almost all day I see many different kids and their behavior not only to their superiors such as their parents or me, but to the other children they play with as well. I am not saying all kids are brats. I am merely stating the obvious increased trend of unruly children. I believe this is due to a lack of enforcement of the rules on behalf of the parent. Parents are too concerned about either their own personal lives or their child's view of them to discipline their children properly when they misbehave. Also when they do punish them for their behavior it is not strict enough so the kids do not really understand the magnitude of the situation. Saying all of that brings me to the point of how should you punish your child, and what is socially acceptable now and days as a punishment. I am fully aware that I do not personal have any children of my own so I do not know first hand what it is like to be a parent but like everyone I was a kid once too and I know what my parents did in order to make me behave; plus I have some experience since I work with kids as my job.
I have always thought that good old fashion spankings could never fail to get the point across when a child has misbehaved. Unfortunately if parents start going around spanking their kids, especially in public, they could find themselves in an unwanted situation. I have seen it happen when a parent spanks their child in public for being bad then out of nowhere some liberal stranger who thinks it is wrong to spank their child sees it and calls the police claiming the parent is abusing their kid. Yes, there might be an extremely few cases of that but the majority of the time the parent was right to do what they did and it is no ones business to interfere with the rearing of someone's child. If physical punishment works best to teach the child not to misbehave then that is what needs to happen but there are other ways which society these days has deemed more acceptable. Now parents instead of physically punishing their child parents opt to take away things the child has or likes to do such as a toy, television, or fun event. They believe that this way the child wants to be better than in order to receive the thing they want most.
Both ways are good in that they get the point across but like we all know all kids are different and respond in totally different ways. What works for one child might not work for another child, so they parent has to change things up a little. The only thing is that parents should not be monitored by strangers and called into the cops for doing something that parents have been doing since the beginning of time. People just need to accept that some people discipline their children differently and not interfere, except if it is an extreme situation.