Sometimes I despair for my fellow man. This is one of those times.
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I use the "food stamp metric" as part of my analysis of the economy and markets.
How are we to take that? Clearly, it is a positive that children in the U.S. do not go hungry for the most part. What does it say about the parents? Does society, and certain special interest groups in particular, bear responsibility for its contribution to the disintegration of the family unit - or the lack of its formation in the first place?
Children living in poverty tend to have one circumstance in common - their father is missing in action, if you will. That the percentage of children living with both parents receiving food assistance is a fraction of all children receiving food assistance is beyond debate. It would seem that the critical input in this data set to work on would be how to encourage/force/cajole/shame/beg/ the children's fathers TO BE FATHERS.
This is a very complicated issue. For instance, the vast majority of "dead beat dads" are in prison, parole, or probation. Its very tough to provide for your children when you are wearing grey pajamas and eating off paper plates. Guess what happens latter in lives of the children of convicts? This is the "gift that keeps on giving" if you are a lawyer, cop, judge, corrections officer, etc... but the rest of us will not be able to support it for much longer.
This is quite the conundrum.
libertariananimal (at) gmail (d0t) com
18 comments:
In a society where nearly everything is a crime and more and more things are becoming crimes every day what do we expect.
I can think of at least one set of laws and one that is about to be passed that should be scrubbed.
The drug war and this requirement to have health insurance. The first fills our prisons and the later is just plain stupid.
Chris:
Bring it on you LIBERTARIAN, you!
This is what we get for paying support for single mothers with children. If you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it. Of course, that's non-pc and an incredibly evil attitude to have, so we will continue to go down the Great Society road to Hades. It's paved with good intentions, after all!
Tweel,
You sound like me.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Back in the days when my daughter was shooting up with heroin, someone told me that avoiding responsibility is the essence of addiction. This simple fact made her seemingly irrational actions completely transparent and predictable to me. It also explains why no one can "help" and addict. Any help is actually the helper assuming responsibility that the addict needs to take for himself. I am grateful every day that she is clean. She has been so for over four years now!
I have since noticed that the people most likely to become addicts of one sort or another are those with no responsibility and those with unbearable responsibility. The welfare system disenfranchises men at the bottom end of the economic ladder. They have little purpose beyond stud service. Thus the drugs and violence. Men want to belong to something bigger than themselves and to feel important. For most men it is family, then job. For the poorest it is the street gang. A man with no responsibility is a dangerous man. Great Society. HA!
Regards,
Coal Guy
Coal Guy and Tweel:
Simple. Like. That.
But of course WE can see this clearly - my bet is, like me, you guys have more salt than pepper in your hair. And you probable knew your father.
Those of us fortunate enough to have had a father that came home every night, and came home every week with a paycheck, have had the benefit of a good example. I look back in AWE of my parents providing for the tribe of kids that they had. Not every kid has the benefit of that experience.
How we undo the damage caused by good intentions is beyond my abilities - but it is worth talking about.
We will tolerate it for a lot longer, just like how we in Chicago tolerate seeing yet another parent crying on TV about the gunshot death of their child. Ain't nothing going to stop it in a country so deluded into thinking guys without jobs can be balanced, useful members (and fathers) of society. I used to think it was just empire capitalism -- that the Chinese made all our products cause they worked better and cheaper, and so all the money/capital would end up over there. Today, I have changed my mind. There is LOTS of money being made here by the rich of this country nursing the export of American jobs to China and India, and buying the politicians to make it happen. Why shouldn't kids be in bread lines? We've allowed it to happen. Thought we sent Obama to Washington to start fixing it, but he's been busy bailing the wealthy out. What a let down. :(
I had two uncles that were psychiatrists (both are gone now, otherwise I wouldn't say anything). One worked with children, the other specialized in criminal behavior. Being brothers, they got together and compared notes. Their findings:
Male sociopaths in prison had an average of six children (with multiple women) each, and their children were much more inclined to be sociopaths as well, around a 40% chance. This was never published as far as I know, not pc and too scary.
Call it job security if you want, but working for the prison isn't fun at all, at all. Budgets are tight, and I'm trying to do the same job with half the people.
Greg,
You are right. I'm over 50, and had a father. Got four daughters up and out. All doing well.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Tweel:
I did not mean to offend you with my "the gift that keeps on giving" comment.
I view our criminal justice system as beyond flawed. That does not make it unnecessary.
Coal Guy:
There is no substitute for being 50. All of the sub-cranial horse power in the world just does not substitute for time on this earth.
I have a bunch of clients in the their 70's that I have known for 20 years or more. When you see a 70+ year old guy with his life in order you are looking at someone who made A GREAT MANY intelligent decisions in his life. These guys are the "last man standing" of their click, gang, family, etc... they were at the funerals of the folks that made lesser decisions, if you will...
Tweel:
Feel free to be as un-pc as you like. Truth will always win in the end, no matter how many special interest group's decry its existen
This is essentially a libertarian blog and at least three of your regular readers/commentors are bureaucrats. Oh the irony.
On topic; the biggest part of the problem is prohibition, it is wrecking liberty, families… One could leave a list a mile long here. There is the lack of responsibility, desperation/stupidity and just plain malice too but that is our traditional population and less than half of what we have now.
Dan:
Its a funny old world...
I think u guys have it wrong.
Its the easy money in drugs that makes it attractive.
If there was no war on drugs, these guys we are putting in jail would be doing some other crime to make the easy money.
THis is why overall crime rates have dropped the last 15 years.
I think anonymous makes a good point about the war on drugs. It was easy to explain away the drop in crime rates in the 1990s--they were due to rising incomes. But since then, how do you explain dropping crime rates, alongside a growing moral narcissism to win at all costs? Anonymous's argument is the best I've heard. I'd never thought of it...
The "Freakonomics" book suggested that the dropoff in crime in the 1990s, which was NOT what the experts had predicted, was caused by the Roe v. Wade decision issued by the Supreme Court. Jeffers won't like this, since he's pro-life, but the logic is simple to follow. Abortion became legal in the 1970s. Instead of kids being born to mothers who didn't want them or couldn't care for them, they were aborted -- millions of them. Children who aren't cared for are more likely to turn into criminals. Fewer "problem" babies in the 1970s mean fewer "problem" teenage boys in the 1990s. The predicted drop in crime in the 1990s took the entire "law enforcement industry" by surprise. They thought all these baby boomer kids were going to swamp the system. Didn't happen.
I'm a hardworking single mom. I'm single because my husband abandoned his family. I've had to go on food stamps from time to time when he refuses to pay his child support. I know we're all uncomfortable interfering in private family matters. But how do you feel when you know you are footing the bill for the needs of another man's children? When you think about children receiving food stamp benefits, remember that in many cases you are really subsidizing the lifestyle of a deadbeat Dad.
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