NY Times tries to spin this as negatively as possible. Check the headline:
Bush Plans $1.5 Billion Drive for Promotion of Marriage…
“This is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base,” a presidential adviser said.
But better an ounce of prevention than a pound of cure…or welfare and law enforcement, as the case may be. That retrograde marriage thang actually works, and it’s cheaper than most programs:
The proposal is the type of relatively inexpensive but politically potent initiative that appeals to White House officials at a time when they are squeezed by growing federal budget deficits…
In the last few years, some liberals have also expressed interest in marriage-education programs. They say a growing body of statistical evidence suggests that children fare best, financially and emotionally, in married two-parent families.
If it’s relatively inexpensive, why put its cost in the headline? Anyway, even the Times has to grudginly admit that kids are better off in married two parent households – and so is society. The nuclear family is the bedrock of Western civilization, and long-term cohabitation and serial monogamy are very poor substitutes. Indeed, it is part of the road to serfdom:
Here I show how the welfare state’s growth can be viewed as the transfer of the “dependency” function from families to state employees. The process began in 19th-century Sweden, through the socialization of children’s economic time via school attendance, child labor, and state old-age pension laws. These changes, in turn, created incentives to have only a few, or no children. In the 1930s, social democrats Gunnar and Alva Myrdal used the resulting “depopulation crisis” to argue for the full socialization of child rearing. Their “family policy,” implemented over the next forty years, virtually destroyed the autonomous family in Sweden, substituting a “client society” where citizens are clients of public employees. While Sweden is now trying to break out of the welfare state trap, the old arguments for the socialization of children have come to the United States.
I am not as negative on smaller families, public education, and child labor as Carlson is in that article. I do think that some accomodations must be made with modernity and higher population densities. However, I don’t believe that the two-parent household is a necessary casualty of technological progress.
Posted by godless at 01:29 AM Comments