Blog Mirror: A Politically Most Incorrect Truth About Childcare

The British Adam Smith Society doesn't fear to tread where it will meet with criticism, that's for sure.

A POLITICALLY MOST INCORRECT TRUTH ABOUT CHILDCARE

Perhaps, in a way, that's because in the modern UK the views of Adam Smith are so much on the outs, so it can sort of safely tread where it will meet with flak.

Anyhow, this raises a really good point, one which we constantly see here in the US.  The logic train, normally raised by progressives, is, as follows.

Raising children is expensive; and

This causes some people, normally women, to drop out of the workplace rather than endure the expense; and

These are women who are likely married, or at least have a stable "partner"; and

They're lost to the workplace for a period of years; and

For "single" women this is a huge burden.

All of that is true.

Which is followed by "gosh, the government needs to do something about this." The "something is often fund daycares, which is a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Nonexistent?

Yep.

More accurately, it's the proposed solution is an affliction of an injustice upon the responsible.  People just don't like saying that, or can't bring themselves to admit it.  It's additionally the subsidization of industry.

Stripped of all its niceties and reduced to reality, what it really amounts to is the following.

Raising children is expensive, but it comes about by way of a voluntary act either undertaken by two people knowing what the results will be, or at least where they should know what the results will be. Society doesn't participate in that act, individuals do. And;

Having the maximum number of people in the workplace, simply as a factor, serves capitalism.  It doesn't serve individuals at all, except by way of their own personal economics; and

For some, those economics are better balanced by one person staying home; and

For others, they've entered into the child-rearing project with limited economic means, which is tragic to be sure, but something people encounter constantly in all sorts of ways.  That unfortunate situation isn't remedied by passing off the economic burden to those who aren't in that situation.

Not that this hasn't occurred to a large degree already.  School breakfasts programs, for example, amount to a large-scale transfer of a parental responsibility to society at large.  At one time, even the poorest in most communities would never have sent their children to school hungry.  Now its widely held that this is the burden of society.

Indeed, progressives, while they will rarely admit it, essentially have the world outlook that all the sacrifice of life should be eliminated and transferred to society at large, where the richer will then be forced to sacrifice for the less fortunate through taxation.  In the child-rearing area, this essentially makes the economic responsibility of child-rearing a nullity passed on to people who don't know the children at all.  That's an injustice.

And more than that, it's an injustice on the parents.

Raising children is sacrifice.  An excellent recent edition of Catholic Stuff You Should Know that referenced fatherhood noted that, in the case of their own fathers, that they'd simply accepted sacrifice for their children, and didn't worry about its fulfilling their own personal needs, or something like that.  The sacrifice was willingly undertaken and a superior good to their own needs.

By acting contrary to that, societal programs have been and are defeating that notion.  The entire propaganda regarding women exiting the workplace to raise children is very much along these lines.  Ironically, in this area, progressives and those on the left are amazingly capitalist, essentially taking the line from Ben Hur, "you live to serve this ship" into the economy. Women, or anyone, dropping out of the workplace is a tragedy as the workplace is the greatest good.  It's the one place that Marx, Lenin, Mao and company can join hands with industrialists.

Except it isn't very human, or just.

Stuff like this has actually reduced the value of work itself, by maximizing the number of people in the labor pool, and its badly damaged the family to the point which in some demographics it nearly doesn't exist.  

Nobody wants to look back, but here people really ought to.  Before all this really got rolling  the reality was that most children were born to married couples and most married couples remained married. They provided for their children themselves, no matter what that meant.  Unfortunate women, and girls, who became pregnant either ended up marrying the father (if you are as old as me, you definitely know at least some couples that came together this way), or the child was given up for adoption (and if you are as old as me, you definitely know at least some people who as infants have this history).  Rarely, and it was quite rare, a woman undertook to raise a child themselves, but when they did so, it meant they likely had the very strong backing of their own parents.

It'd have been better if we stuck with that.  It would be better, but darned near impossible, to restore that situation.  Expanding the opposite is a mistake.