Hell, La Lubu, why aren’t you running ?!

Thank you. I’m just bone-tired of stereotypes and prejudice being trotted out as “evidence”.

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any general admission that there have been significant structural changes to our social infrastructure, and how lack of a social safety net impacts the average person. Social infrastructure has never been just about having friends, family, and neighbors to say hello to; it’s also been about a safety net of concrete resources that one could rely upon in times of need—the ties that bind. Back in my grandparents day, networks of large extended families and other people who grew up together their entire lives lived in fairly close proximity to one another. These people were a vital source of resources for one another—not just people to sit on the stoop with and shoot the shit. What’s more, it didn’t feel like charity; the mutuality of these relationships guaranteed a certain dignity. Efforts to help were social obligations, not handouts.

Very few people in the U.S. have access to that kind of network anymore. Economic circumstances have scattered families to the four winds, in search of jobs, or in search of affordable housing. Economic destruction in the Rust Belt and in small towns/rural areas means there may not be any jobs available in the old family stomping grounds. The integrity of the eight-hour-day has been decimated for most folks; now the standard is the ten-hour day. Lack of affordable housing close to employment means long commutes. Second jobs are taken even if the immediate economic need isn’t there, as a hedge against job instability.

These conditions do not contribute to the rebuilding of community, to say the least. In my neighborhood, people do tend to know each other, but it hasn’t replaced the community of old. For example, there have been plenty of break-ins in my neck of the woods—not because neighborhood residents don’t give a damn about each other, but because during the day the neighborhood is a ghost town. Thieves know that everyone will be at work. In the early evenings, it’s not much better—folks are either scrambling to get to their second job, or hustle their kids off to extracurriculars (yes, the working class does this too—it’s an inoculation against drugs and gang violence). Old folks have a hard time making ends meet, trying to buy medication and still pay utilities in drafty old houses.

What I’m getting at, if that folks can look around them and see that physical infrastructure is falling apart. But they don’t see that our social infrastructure has fallen apart, too. We are told that taxpayer monies should only go towards physical infrastructure—perhaps because contractors that provide physical infrastructure have deep pockets and powerful lobbies. We keep being told that the “free market” will provide us with things like day care, yet in my city, day cares are shutting down even though the need for that day care is still great. Why? No one wants to invest in a business like day care, which has a relatively low profit margin. Why should that be such a surprise? Profit-earning companies are offshored for much less. We are told that charity should replace taxpayer-supported programs (that are accessible by all), at a time when fewer and fewer people feel any sense of attachment to the community they live in.

Age segregation is common; old folks are more likely to live away from younger people. Race segregation has always been operative, but it is increasing in schools—white people who may find themselves living in an integrated neighborhood still make sacrifices to insure their kids are attending an all-white or near-all-white school. Class segregation is getting ridiculuous—the rich have always segregated themselves from the rest of us, but now neighborhoods are getting as tightly formatted by annual income as radio stations are by the individual songs they play.

Just as our roads, schools and railways aren’t going to magically fix themselves, public monies have to be shunted off to institutions that are either going to replace or rebuild the organic societal infrastructure that no longer exists. Look, I have a large extended family that loves one another very much—but we can’t be of much practical help to one another because we all live hundreds of miles away from each other. We did all the “right things”, got an education, kept our noses to the grindstone, and we still don’t have a safety net. We’re not looking for “handouts”. We’re looking for some way to meet all the conflicting obligations of our lives.

I kept my part of the social contract. I have a career. I pay my own bills. I’m not a criminal. Yet, if I even complain about the lack of means for me to meet my obligations as a daughter, as a mother, as an employee, as a community member….somehow that gets translated into “she just wants a handout.” No. I want recognition that no matter how hard I work, I will never earn enough money to be able to purchase “private” help. I want recognition that I’m a taxpayer also, and that my needs and the needs of others like me need to be taken into account. Yes, there will be times I need to take off from work in order to care for my daughter (or to care for my mother). Why is it asking too much to ask that I still have a job to go back to? Am I not also contributing to the well-being of our society by providing these services? I think it’s pretty telling that those who care for children and the elderly are among the least paid of our citizenry. Might as well say, “fuck those kids; fuck those sick old folks.”

Look, I gotta get to work. I hope some of this made sense. I’ll be thinking about it for the next couple of days (I have a tight schedule this week), and maybe I can come up with something coherent on my own blog over the weekend.

Thanks, Maia, for bringing up the topic.

La Lubu that’s a lot more civil than my response to Brandon Berg could ever be.

My basic argument against Maia is given that parents get benefits from having kids that no-one else gets, surely it’s unfair that paying for their upbringing should be communal? I’m not assuming there’s no social good in having kids. I’m just questioning whether if people do something for their own private reasons, do it unasked, and do it because they gain private benefits from doing it, it should be funded publicly just because there are some positive external spillovers.

(Maia - sorry, I wasn’t trying to call you a Marxist. I was just trying to point out the debate seemed to had split between (1) “collective provision of all childcare costs!” and (2) “all taxation is theft!”).

My mother became physically disabled after my parent’s divorce. She raised her kids on disability, child support, and the paltry assistance that the state would give her. We barely existed above the poverty line, and yet she raised two intelligent, well-behaved, well-rounded daughters. Now she is caring for her aging father with Parkinson’s, and though he and my Grandmother were frugal and “smart” about their finances…it still isn’t enough. He pays something like $1200 a month out of his pocket for his medication, that amount is more than my mortgage payment.

I am concerned that a purely Libertarian, read as the current political label, view would leave the survival and welfare of the poor, poor children, and the elderly in the hands of fate. I would like to see a balanced and fair policy for preventing dire poverty and elder poverty.

Any ideas?

What do you think?

Tell you what I think—that the key phrase in this is “whom we believe”, the unspoken “we” of course, being upper-middle class, white suburbanites. Bah. Effective parenting comes in all classes, just as dysfunctional parenting does. I think a policy of this nature does nothing more that to legitimize pre-existing biases. Frankly, I’ve known more reprobates who were raised by those good white middle-class parents, because such parents consistently used their clout to shelter their progeny from the consequences of their actions.

Then again, I’m one of those “lower class single women”, so what do I know? I just get to hear shocked commentary from the middle class that my daughter is bright, well-behaved, and has a large vocabulary. I heard the same commentary as a child; the idea that “those people” couldn’t possibly do a good job of child-raising is still with us.

I still do have some concerns about the phrase “collectively,” actually, because it tends to have some of the same ambiguities as “responsibility” (does it mean a burden everyone has to bear together, or does it just mean something that a bunch of people can choose to co-operatively take on?). I guess in your case the question I would ask is: suppose that I’m the aforementioned curmudgeon, and I don’t want to contribute either labor or material resources to child-raising, and I deliberately choose the work that I’m going to do and the transactions I’m going to make in such a way that I don’t. Can I be forced to go along with the child-raising scheme, and forced to support child-raising whether I want to or not?

That’s hard to be to answer, because I was just trying to give principles about what would be a society that values women’s labour, and I get terribly wishy-washy when it comes time to talk about my ideal society.

On one level no I don’t think my ideal society would involve forcing people to do anything.

On another level I think it is reasonable that the needs of the old, the young are met by everyone, because everyone is going to be in that situation at some stage of their life. Even if the hypothetical curmudgeon didn’t want anything to do with children now, when they were a child they were supported in a similar way (see wishy-washy - Naomi Klein says that democracy is a very zen thing, because if you’re truly committed to democracy you can’t insist on an outcome, and I get very like that when I try to talk about ideal societies).

PS: Nik although every Marxist supports the redistribution of wealth not everyone who supports the redistribution of wealth is a Marxist, he had a few other ideas.

The problem with saying is that we should subsidize public goods is that you invariably have to tax other public goods to pay for it. If you want to fund subsidies for raising children with income taxes, then that means that you have to tax labor and investment, both of which have positive externalities (it’s true that they also have considerable private benefits, but so does raising children). It’s not enough to say that raising children is a public good (which it is only in a very broad sense of the term)–you also have to make the case that the benefit from subsidizing it will be greater than the cost.

But if we’re going to subsidize raising children because of its positive externalities (and we already do, to some extent, via tax credits, free education, and good, old-fashioned hand-outs), then we should structure the subsidies so that we get the most bang for our buck. Maybe we could look into paying greater subsidies to those whom we believe will make the best parents and reducing the subsidies for those who generally don’t make very good parents. So, for example, we would give a bit more money to middle-class married couples and less to lower-class single women. And maybe the government should check in every once in a while to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth.

What do you think?

that nobody can ever legitimately object to new or existing “public good” projects?

No, Brandon, that argument came entirely out of your own head.

“Why should I support the public good?” Because Libertarian Utopia, where you don’t spend money on anything that doesn’t equally and directly benefit you, is imaginary.

Now, if y’all are arguing that children (that is, people having them in general, not you having them personally) is NOT a public good, why, say so. But the argument that we should all get to pay taxes that go towards only things that benefit us is pretty silly and unworkable.

The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.

It’s strange that this thread has boiled down to a hardcore Libertarian vs. hardcore Marxist debate. My position is a minimalist one that the state has a duty to keep everyone out of poverty. I find it very hard to understand Maia’s position.

People enjoy having children and have them for fun. They do it for their own benefit (and I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with this). But given that, I can’t see why they shouldn’t be expected to provide the funds needed - if they are able to. If people do something for their own enjoyment, then I can’t see how going it this gives them a legitimate claim on other people’s money. I think the state has a general obligation to alleviate poverty, and it should intervene in order to prevent children falling below the poverty line. But I see this just as one instance of a general obligation to prevent anyone falling below the poverty line.

La Lubu:

I don’t know what Maia is envisioning when she refers to the collectiveness of child-rearing, but I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the necessity of certain institutions needed to simultaneously raise children and keep a roof over one’s head

I would too, and I happen to dislike sour child-hating curmudgeons on both an individual and societal level (although not because I think they’re somehow ungrateful; the problem with them is that they’re generally petty and mean).

My question isn’t about the ends to be achieved; it’s about the means used to achieve them.

Likewise.

I didn’t use the phrase ‘collective responsibility’, and I wouldn’t. The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.

Right; that was beachcomber who used the phrase. Sorry for not making that clear.

I still do have some concerns about the phrase “collectively,” actually, because it tends to have some of the same ambiguities as “responsibility” (does it mean a burden everyone has to bear together, or does it just mean something that a bunch of people can choose to co-operatively take on?). I guess in your case the question I would ask is: suppose that I’m the aforementioned curmudgeon, and I don’t want to contribute either labor or material resources to child-raising, and I deliberately choose the work that I’m going to do and the transactions I’m going to make in such a way that I don’t. Can I be forced to go along with the child-raising scheme, and forced to support child-raising whether I want to or not?

If so, why?

If not, I have no problem with the arrangement (indeed, I think it’s a very good suggestion), but I think maybe “co-operative” (or one of the other phrases I mentioned above) might be a clearer way of putting the nature of child-raising as you see it than “collective.”

Grace:

Barbara Kingsolver (I think) made the argument that even if you’re child-free by choice, you still have a vested interest in the way kids in society in general are raised. Because when you’re old and sick, who’s going to be providing your medical care, repairing your house, doing your taxes, cooking your food, making the laws that affect you, and so on? … (The context of this was her argument against people who didn’t want to pay taxes that supported schools.)

Whether she’s right about this or not, I don’t think that the argument supports the claim that people who are “child-free by choice” should be forced to pay for schools.

Provided that she’s correct, all that she’s proven is that it may be foolish or imprudent for people who are “child-free by choice” not to contribute money to schools because they run the risk of losing out on some future benefit (just as it may be foolish of me to spend all my money buying DVDs and potato chips when I could be putting down money for a vacation that I’ll enjoy a lot more than the DVDs and the chips). But the suggestion here is not that childless people be encouraged or exhorted to contribute money to schools; it’s that they be forced to do so, whether they want to or not.

Merely showing that it would be foolish not to do something isn’t the same as showing that the government should make you do it against your will, unless you are employing a further premise that it’s the government’s job to force you and me not to be foolish. (I don’t think that it is.)

Maybe there’s some other reason why the government should make you pay for government-run schools, but I don’t think that this is enough reason as it stands.

As for collectively supporting children, I think that things like having tax money go towards schools, affordable daycare, parks, etc is about as much collectively supporting most other people’s children as I want to go. I dont think people should be obligated to do more. I make exceptions for the children of some close friends, of course. There is a certain amount of joy in being the spinster aunt and it is a valuable relationship for the kids too. But, certainly that is less obligation than personal preference.

And about the “tax-break” issue; non-parents have this absurd idea that because I am a single mother, that I can deduct the entire cost of child care that is necessary for me to go to work. Nope. I get to deduct a very small portion of that cost—a fifth of what I pay out. I paid fewer taxes as a childless adult. Our tax code is set up to assume that because I am a breadwinner, I therefore must have a live-in, unpaid child-care provider (you know, a wife). Child-care is viewed as a luxury good purchased by women that “allows” us to work. No one becomes a parent because they’re going to make out like a bandit at tax time! Contrast that with the tax benefits of purchasing a house.

I imagine them working in a non-capitalist society, because that’s where . But I think you can, like La Lubu was, use the same sort of ideas to evaluate our current society and figure out what to work for.

My concern is with the phrase “collective responsibility.” People sometimes use “responsibility” to mean something that you can choose or not choose to take on; sometimes they use it to mean something that you are required to do, and can be forced to do, whether you like it or not. And when they start talking about how X or Y is a “collective responsibility” a lot of times they mean the latter rather than the former (since it suggests that you’re talking about a burden for everyone to bear, instead of something that they willingly choose to take on because they want to do it). Why not talk about child-rearing being something “open to all,” or something “everyone can help out with,” instead of a “collective responsibility”?

I didn’t use the phrase ‘collective responsibility’, and I wouldn’t. The only way I would refer to childcare as a collective responsibility is in the sense that I think that the resources required to raise children (and by that I mean all the things La Lubu mentions, but also things like food and stretch and grows, and bikes, and toys and high charis) and also the resources to support those raising children, should be provided by people collectively, not just by the parents.

You have to laugh every once in awhile right?

I discovered this hilarious blog yesterday…

http://goofyblog.net

And thats gone a long way into making the days a bit easier to handle.

:)

Mary

That said:

Unfortunately, Rad Geek, you live in a society that has a minimal level of communal support–you know, tax breaks for charity, funding for soup kitchens, and so on.

I can’t see how this appeal cuts any ice at all. I was also born into a society where heterosexual marriage is widespread, where homophobia is widespread, where a minimal level of sexist jokes, are widespread, etc., but that’s not an argument for sexist jokes or homophobia, and it’s not an argument for forcing me to get heterosexually hitched either. Why should the fact that I was born into a society where people carry on a certain way affect whether or not (1) I ought to support them carrying on that way, or (2) I ought to be forced to carry on that way myself?

Even if you think all poor people should curl up and die, you still have to pay taxes that go to feed poor people.

I’m aware that I am. I’m questioning whether forcing people to contribute to causes they don’t support is right, not whether it is done.

You might say that if I’m taking advantage of communal support that I’m unwilling to contribute to later, then that’s at least a vice on my part. Perhaps that I’m, say, selfish or ungrateful. Maybe so, but I don’t think that just pointing this out:

If this makes you curmudgeonly, do consider that you’ve been the benefit of ‘public good’ projects–if not directly, then indirectly.

… proves that to be the case. I wasn’t asked whether or not whether I wanted to benefit from various cooperative or tax-funded projects, so I don’t see how I have even any prima facie moral obligation to support them now. Let alone an enforceable debt to them.

Robert:

I would suggest that. Although I don’t much like the communal child-raising pipedream, if that were the mechanism we selected as a society, you would owe it support and fealty. … Otherwise, get out. If you won’t support society’s requirement to transmit itself through time, then you don’t deserve to participate in the side benefits that such societies tend to provide. Go live in the woods and be a lonely hermit.

If you want to voluntarily dissociate from childless people who don’t support the raising of other people’s children (by whatever means is prevalent in a given community), then you are of course free to do so. I don’t see, however, where you think you get the right to tell me whether or not I can live on my own land (which happens to be in the middle of a city, not in the woods), or whether or not I can interact with and trade with other people who happen not to share your views (most shopkeeps don’t care very much whether or not their paying customers are sufficiently child-friendly, and while I happen not to be a child-hating curmudgeon, I know plenty of people who wouldn’t hold it against me if I were).

If you’re just suggesting that I have a right to be a sour child-hating curmudgeon, and you have a right to ostracize me and encourage your neighbors to do the same, then we’re in agreement (although I think the reasons you’re suggesting for the ostracism are rather silly). But if you’re suggesting that you have a right to force me to move out, or to force other people not to interact with me, then I have to wonder what you think gives you the right to treat me and them that way.

Maia:

Just for the record under my red nightmare no-one would be required to work doing child raising. It would just be one of the many forms of work that people would do.

Well, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with it, then. I think it sounds pretty nice, in point of fact.

My concern is with the phrase “collective responsibility.” People sometimes use “responsibility” to mean something that you can choose or not choose to take on; sometimes they use it to mean something that you are required to do, and can be forced to do, whether you like it or not. And when they start talking about how X or Y is a “collective responsibility” a lot of times they mean the latter rather than the former (since it suggests that you’re talking about a burden for everyone to bear, instead of something that they willingly choose to take on because they want to do it). Why not talk about child-rearing being something “open to all,” or something “everyone can help out with,” instead of a “collective responsibility”?

La Lubu:

I don’t know what Maia is envisioning when she refers to the collectiveness of child-rearing, but I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the necessity of certain institutions needed to simultaneously raise children and keep a roof over one’s head

I would too, and I happen to dislike sour child-hating curmudgeons on both an individual and societal level (although not because I think they’re somehow ungrateful; the problem with them is that they’re generally petty and mean).

My question isn’t about the ends to be achieved; it’s about the means used to achieve them.

If this makes you curmudgeonly, do consider that you’ve been the benefit of ‘public good’ projects”“if not directly, then indirectly.

Your point is . . . what? That since we have “public good” projects now, and since everyone has arguably received some benefit from them in the past, that nobody can ever legitimately object to new or existing “public good” projects? That’s rather convenient, isn’t it?