Australia’s leading left-familist academics are at it again today, with a 39 point list of more taxes and regulations, which they call ‘Benchmarks: Work and Family Poilcies in Election 2007’, to enforce their view on family life on the rest of us.
I have criticised much of the underlying analysis in previous posts (eg here, here, and here).
While I have objected to the way familists want to redistribute money to people with children (or to people with children on behalf of children, as backroom girl would insist), I have not emphasised they way they propose to redistribute time.
Given that most taxpayers earn their income via personal labour, some redistribution of time is implicit in the tax system. To get a given amount of after-tax income, the higher the taxes levied to support families the more pre-tax income a worker has to earn, and that means longer hours. Most men prefer to work full-time anyway, so while familist policies appropriate the results of their labour, they probably don’t actually significantly increase male hours. Women, however, are often more sensistive to the financial rewards from working (hence the complaints in ‘Benchmarks’ about high EMTRs) and their part-time work is used to bring household income up to a desired level.
But also important is the redistribution of hours within the workplace. Giving rights to some workers, those with families, denied to others means that those without families suffer the consequences – the total amount of work to be done is unlikely to go down because someone wants to work less or at a different time or to vanish for days or weeks on leave not available to others.
Employers will to some extent be able to manage these problems with casual labour (about which the same group of academics will then inconsistently complain, demanding ‘quality’ jobs) or short-term contracts. But in practice only unskilled jobs are usually easily filled this way, either because the position requires too much employer-specific knowledge or because there are too few workers in the short-term labour market. In other cases the work has to be done by requiring more hours from on-going staff.
This problem affects several ‘Benchmarks’ proposals. For example, it favours denying employers the right to refuse, without first ‘reasonably considering’ them, requests for changes to working hours including quantum of hours worked, scheduling of hours, and location of work (this is phrased as a right to request such changes, but of course employees have always held such a right – the only difference is that some external body will be second-guessing what is ‘reasonable’).
It suggests protecting employees from ‘family unfriendly’ unilateral or arbitrary changes to working hours – but if such changes need to be made, why should only those without families have to work?
Over time the ‘Benchmarks’ academics want ‘an increase in total paid leave available to working parents until households share 52 weeks of paid parental leave, including maternity/paternity and parenting leave’. A year of taxpayer expense and inconvenience to fellow workers for every kid born!
As I have said before about the left-familist workplace agenda:
What’s missing in this … is the sense that an employment arrangement is one of mutual advantage between employer and employee to provide goods and services from which other people benefit – rather than just something to benefit the employee, regardless of its effects on others.
The Australian workplace should continue to be based on arrangements of mutual advantage, rather than the arrangement being dominated by the non-work lives of some employees. It’s possible that those without families will be happy to work extra hours. It’s possible that employers will be able to accommodate requests for different hours by employing new staff. But this should be a matter of consent, not decree.
Much of ‘Benchmarks’ is just a rewrite of the old industrial relations order, not only in its attempts to micromanage every aspect of working life, but in its assumption that non-work life is relevant to the IR rules. In the old days women were paid less because it was assumed they would not be the main breadwinner and had to leave some jobs when they got married. The ‘Benchmarks’ package is little different in making assumed family circumstances and political conceptions of family life important to employment law. Yet again, we have prominent leftists wanting to take us back to the 1950s.
Andrew Norton 
“To get a given amount of after-tax income, the higher the taxes levied to support families the more pre-tax income a worker has to earn”
That’s a very strange argument from a small goverment person. The usual claim is that high tax rates discourage effort.
Are you saying the income effect outweighs the substitution effect and so the elasticity of labour supply is negative (ie the higher the return, the less people work)? If so, we should tax people heavily to get them to work.
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I don’t think Andrew is suggesting they will actually work, just that they need to.
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Given that the liberal party have been the most egregious enforcers of 1950’s style family policies, I’d hardly call this a movement of the left. More a conservative one. The “familist” label is as fatuous as the “leftist” one too, although the Unabomber didn’t call people familists, so it’s probably safer.
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DD – I was a little vague on that point because I think both effects operate, and I was not sure what the net effect on hours would be. Either way, the tax system distorts work patterns.
DR – I think the familist label is a good one, because it isolates an issue concern – it is like environmentalist or feminist. It can be influenced by different ideological perspectives, eg Howard has tried to make it easier for wives to stay at home (FTB B), while the Benchmarks group propose a level of intervention in the labour market which Liberals would not support (so ‘left-familist’ narrows it down a bit). But both are concerned to promote the family.
Howard’s position shows how conservative policymaking has evolved. Prescription is gone, to be replaced by financial incentives (hence my complaints about ‘big government conservatism’). The left-familists use financial incentives as well, but are happy to use prescription in a way and to an extent not seen on the conservative side.
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The left-familists use financial incentives as well, but are happy to use prescription in a way and to an extent not seen on the conservative side.
I don’t agree with that statement at all. The main reason prescription is being advocated here is to avoid all of the employer-employee relationship being expressed merely as dollars. Funnily enough, it’s exactly the same argument that AWA’s were supposed to be about. Or is Shrekkey making stuff up when he talks about lawn mowing men working at 5:00am to get home for their kids?. Both sides are using prescription, just in different ways. I would hardly characterise the Liberal position as evolved, unless a centralised, slow slide into third world wages and conditions is what is considered evolution.
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David, I think you have a funny idea of what “prescription” means. The fact that, say, in a deregulated labour market, employers can request employees to do something and sack them if they refuse does not mean that employers “prescribe” the way a person lives his or her life. An employee faced with such a situation can always choose to conform to the employer’s request or seek a job elsewhere (or decide not to work at all). This is different from a situation where the Government tells an employee how they must work, how much they must be paid or when they must go home.
As for a “slow slide into third world wages”, I don’t know which country you are living in! France perhaps?
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Rajat Sood wrote:
David, I think you have a funny idea of what “prescription” means.
Possibly – although I would note that most of the positives about AWA’s were described in terms of family friendliness. We didn’t hear anybody talking up the benefits of negotiating away your holidays so you had more money to spend on booze, or negotiating down your salary so you could skateboard more. Of course employers are prescribing how to live your life when they insist you work weekends – how else would you describe it?
The third world thing was a bit over the top, but there seems a distinct contrast between the recent politician pay rise and the niggardly minimum wage rise – not a good look in my opinion and Rudd should have had the guts to oppose the polly one.
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“there seems a distinct contrast between the recent politician pay rise and the niggardly minimum wage rise”
They have one thing in common – they were not set in the market.
Federal MPs work lives are about as family unfriendly as you can get.
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Andrew Norton wrote:
Federal MPs work lives are about as family unfriendly as you can get.
Oh, won’t someone staunch the jet of claret from my bleeding heart. Those poor servants of the public, enslaved to democracy, their daily sacrifice a cruel burden of truly epic proportions. Oh wait, they’re on holiday.
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David, you said:
“Of course employers are prescribing how to live your life when they insist you work weekends – how else would you describe it?”
Um, “insist”? What about just saying “no”?. How about the expression, “You can take this job and shove it”? I believe people resign from jobs quite often and most find other jobs. In fact, I would wager that turnover in low-skill, low-pay jobs is higher than in high-pay jobs, suggesting that low-skill employees are not inhibited about exercising their rights to leave. Prescribing the way we live our lives is something that only the Government has the ability to do.
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Rajat Sood wrote:
Um, “insist”? What about just saying “no”?.
The problem with that argument is that some people simply do not have the same choices that you and I might have. Further, we’re not just talking about the low skilled and low payed. I’ve certainly been coerced into working hours I hated (weekends especially) but needed the job (mortgages and babies have that controlling effect). It’s naive to think that governments are the only entities with the ability to coerce – your employer imposes a raft of behaviours on you that likely you don’t notice are oppressive. From simple things like dress standards and personal appearance to serious problems such as the right to free association (not all employers, but definitely some), recreational drug testing and the routine surveillance of your daily activities? The biggest chunk of your waking hours are prescribed, more so if you are a low-skilled worker.
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As BG has often pointed out, I don’t think people can take on mortgages and children and then sensibly complain that some of their other choices are limited.
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Andrew Norton wrote:
As BG has often pointed out, I don’t think people can take on mortgages and children and then sensibly complain that some of their other choices are limited.
I don’t agree. Arguably, people raising children are doing the most important work of any society (i.e. guaranteeing it’s future). I don’t agree to the extent with which the traditional family is being reinforced (i.e. FTB and baby bonus should go or be far better targeted). Those who choose to raise a family already know their choices are limited – especially women who interrupt careers to raise children. Given the much wider education of women and their importance to the workforce, extending maternity leave to fathers would seem like a sensible productivity measure.
Simply put, your decision not to have children makes you a cross-generational burden.
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FTB and baby bonus do not reinforce the ‘traditional family’, but benefit anyone with kids. Single parents have done well out of them.
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David, on your approach, Ben Cousins (the AFL player) is oppressed because his employer (the WC Eagles) won’t let him play if he engages in recreational drug use. But the guy gets paid nearly a million bucks a year! What about all those poor Mac Bank sods having to wear suits every day? And let’s not forget poor John Howard and Kevin Rudd – having to shave on Sundays to appear on Meet the Press or Insiders. They just don’t realise have bad they have it.
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“Arguably, people raising children are doing the most important work of any society (i.e. guaranteeing it’s future).”
Society as a meta-organism. Interesting perspective – I wonder to what extent people have studied societies as organisms?
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Rajat, Ben Cousins is a perfect example. What business is it of his employer? None – up until the point where he can’t play at the level they expect. If he can play like a million dollar player while stoned out of his gourd and simultaneously texting lewd messages to comely lasses in the crowd, what’s the issue?
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“superb piece” Bah! When will this heartless jeremiad against children end? Most people surely agree with me that being able to have a family is a basic human right. But people on ordinary incomes can’t afford to not have both parents working. There is the problem. This problem has destructive consequences for workplaces, relationships and children.
Extending BG’s useful point: the children have rights too, including, I would think, not being dumped into something euphemistically descibed as ‘child care’ on days when they are sick, of having proper food prepared for them, on having the care and attention they need from parents.
Having worked in libraries where 95% of the staff are women, over the period when all the baby boomers were having their children, and returning to work part-time, I can tell you it can wreck an organisation, and stress the mothers (and presumably the fathers and children). It is no solution to say those women shouldn’t have children – the only solution I can see is to make it possible for mothers or fathers to stay out of the workforce, if they choose, until the children are at school.
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People make the decision to have children (and when) or not and then make the choice of consumption and saving. These are all personal choices the state should have no role in. Subsidising one choice as more preferrable to another is plainly unjust.
Expecting others to pay for your personal choices or advocating that some pay for the personal choices of others is immoral.
Programmes like the baby bonus and sole parent pensions may well encourage people into making short term decisions with long term consequences that are incompatible with their own welfare or that of the potential child. Better to let people make their own decisions without state influence.
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Brendan Halfweeg wrote:
Expecting others to pay for your personal choices or advocating that some pay for the personal choices of others is immoral.
Yes the choices are personal. No, that doesn’t mean society should have no interest in children. Without them, you get no continuation. Society becomes a single generation dead end. There is nothing immoral about subsidising this activity, far from it.
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David, my point about Ben Cousins was that he has a choice. If he believes his personal habits are no business of his employer, he can move clubs or change career. I doubt if he plays in order to put food on the table. If you are saying that people like Ben Cousins do not have the ability to opt out of these employer demands, then I think your definition of “prescription” is unlikely to be meaningful to most people.
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“Most people surely agree with me that being able to have a family is a basic human right. But people on ordinary incomes can’t afford to not have both parents working. There is the problem. This problem has destructive consequences for workplaces, relationships and children.”
The idea of the “right” mentioned in the first sentence is very slippery! The ability to have children is biologically true for many women, but you can’t say definitely very much beyond that.
Russell, what’s your “solution” to this “problem”?
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Rajat Sood wrote:
David, my point about Ben Cousins was that he has a choice.
and my point is that not everybody has the same choices as me or your or Mr Cousins. It’s absurd to extrapolate his multitude of choices to everybody. As for my definition of prescription being unmeaningful to most people, I can only assume that anybody who held a “joe job” for any period of time will inherently understand the power that a petty micro-manager has over someone who needs a job. There’s easily a generation of people floating around who have never experienced a recession and who are in for a big shock when they realise the “take this job and shove it” attitude to their job is no longer exercisable for practical reasons.
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David – extrapolation? It was you who suggested that employers prescribe how we live our lives when they tell us what to wear or ask us to submit to drug testing. I was just saying that this applies as much to rich people like Ben Cousins as it does to unskilled workers. Therefore, it becomes kind of meaningless to define “prescription” in this way. On the more bread-and-butter issue of employers demanding employees work certain hours, the point remains that even in a recession, a worker as a choice. As with any choice, there is an opportunity cost in that something must be foregone – in this case, perhaps wages at that firm. But there is a qualitative difference between the exercise of choice under constraints, which all of us do a hundred times every day, and the state compelling us to do or not do something on pain of criminal punishment.
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Rajat Sood wrote:
But there is a qualitative difference between the exercise of choice under constraints, which all of us do a hundred times every day, and the state compelling us to do or not do something on pain of criminal punishment.
Same old libertarian claptrap. Most of us deal with the government once or twice a year, and deal with our employers 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Who is exercising more direct control over your behaviour?
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Well, I have to deal with my wife 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but that doesn’t mean she “prescribes” how I live my life. We’ve both made a choice and negotiate or seek compromises around what both of us want. Often that’s the same thing but not always. It’s the same with a workplace (or any other) relationship. It’s only the Government one cannot negotiate with.
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Rajat Sood wrote:
It’s only the Government one cannot negotiate with.
Your local member is listed in the phone book.
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Thanks David, I’ll remember that next time I get fined for jaywalking.
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Back at comment 19, Russell said:
Russell, your human rights argument was fully debunked on the comments thread of Andrew’s “The maternal state” post of 29 June. By raising it again here, you really are starting to look like Monty Python’s black knight.
The argument is not one against children. Children do indeed have rights and warrant at least some minimum standard of care – both in the emotional as well as the material sense. That might even involve full-time parenting in their early years, rather than being “dumped” in childcare. However, the argument is about who should be responsible for providing for children: their parents, or the childless?
The fact that there are costs involved in removing oneself from the workforce to “mother” (normally) a child is really no different from the argument that there are significant costs in other respects from having a child. There are. But the fact that the choice to do something – in this case to have a childre – has high costs does not mean that others should pay for those costs.
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“your human rights argument was fully debunked” – actually I thought that all we could conclude from that discussion is that human rights are what we say they are, and I’m sure that most people would say that having a couple of kids is a human right.
But, that doesn’t matter, in the sense that we can be sure that people WILL have kids. So what do we do then, as Sacha asked? The children have rights, the employer and other employees have rights. I’ve seen the damage done to all concerned by making it an economic necessity to have both parents working, so my practical solution would be to make it possible for one parent to stay home (in the absence of a volunteer grandparent or someone) until the child/ren are at school, at least. To say people should choose not to have kids is just impractical, silly really.
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Russell, if having a couple of kids is a human right, who is going to give kids to the infertile couple, the gay couple or the single bloke who has a desire to be a father? Have their rights been violated if they can’t have a child, and if so, who has violated them? What if you want children and your wife doesn’t, has she violated your rights? Read what you write and make a reassessment over what you consider are rights. Positive rights make no sense, full stop.
Fertility is a basic biological function and the choice to exercise your fertility requires the consent of an equally fertile member of the opposite sex or the resources to pay for fertility treatment to overcome fertility problems, or egg/sperm donors, or surrogates, or adoption.
Dave, I really think you are over-reacting to say that not subsidising families means a generational dead end. All it means is that parents need to make better decisions about when they have their children and how they will allocate their resources. People were having children a long time before the family rebate has been around, so people are capable of making these choices, even more so now that medicine has given us greater control over fertility.
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“…so my practical solution would be to make it possible for one parent to stay home (in the absence of a volunteer grandparent or someone) until the child/ren are at school, at least.”
How much would this cost the taxpayer?
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Brendan – I said earlier that rights could be looked at as a responsibility that we should do certain things for each other – in this case, not prevent people from having a couple of kids, or prevent kids from getting the parental care they need, just because it now takes two incomes to maintain a home.
If infertility can’t be helped, then it can’t be helped. Sometimes rights conflict. It’s complicated and takes negotiation as views change: look how animals are now being included in our ‘rights’ discussions.
How useless have right-wing economists been in this discussion? Here is a problem: people have and will continue to have children; in the current situation where both parents, if not well-paid, need to work, this creates real difficulties for parents, children, employers and employees. The solution proposed by the right-wingers is to tut tut about irresponsible choices made by the parents. Thanks a lot guys, that’s completely useless. Life isn’t some sort of chess game in which you are supposed to think out the consequences of every move as far ahead as you can, so as to avoid being ” a loser”.
Sacha asks how much will it cost to solve the problem. The answer is: not more than we can afford. “We” as in we all have some responsibility to help each other have a decent life. It does take a village to raise a child.
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Russell, I’m not saying that parents must both work, only that they have to make decisions regarding the mix of the consumption and saving. Life choices are limited, but some parents will choose to both work in order to provide their children with a McMansion and a private education. Others will accept lesser status housing as renters in order to ensure one parent can remain at home. The choices are endless, but there are still choices, no matter what your situation.
I don’t want to prevent people from having children, but not donating money to them to pay for their doesn’t prevent them from having children. How is not wanting to pay for other people’s choices prevent them from having a choice? You are not making sense.
There are multiple ideas that would reduce the pressure on everyone, including families, and increase peoples ability to make choices. A primary one would be a reduction in taxation, allowing working people to keep more of their income instantly gives them the choice of how to use that income, be it for childrearing or vacations in Vegas.
Another idea would be to deregulate land supply to enable more land to be released for housing. This is one of the primary causes of the perceived unaffordability of housing. State governments won’t release land because this means infrastructure and it props up existing home owners and voters property values. I don’t really care about people rent seeking on the back of government land releases, and infrastructure could just as easily be provided privately.
The reduction in housing costs would immediately free up resources to enable parents and others greater freedom to make choices that are valuable to them.
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Russell, thinking about it again, your right to have children as you describe it, isn’t so much a right, as a nice-to-have. By mixing your nice-to-have ideas in with the concept of rights, you are confusing the issue. Negatve rights are not equivalent to your nice-to-have positive rights.
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Brendan – let’s leave the rights discussion. I remain serenely certain that most people, like myself, agree with the UN Declaration of Human Rights that people “have the right to marry and to found a family”.
I’m glad that you agree that people aren’t going to deny themselves children, and so solutions need to be found to the problems we see around us. Opening up more land is expensive too – look at the $2 billion rail line (and it’s ongoing subsidisation) being built to service the sprawl south to Mandurah. I don’t really see tax cuts as ever going to be large enough to allow people on low incomes to do without a second income.
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Perhaps the UN should have said that “people have the right to not be prevented from marrying and founding a family”, which makes a lot more sense. Not that I think the UN is the bastion of human rights defenders when you consider the list of nations who have participated in or chaired their Commission on Human Rights. Human Rights seem to be relative to the cultural history of the countries involved. If it is OK to bomb airliners in Libya, then the UN respects that right and rewards them with the chair to the Human Rights love-in.
The New Metro Rail in Perth will be a joke, empty trains outside of peak period, a giant train set to make politicians and voters feel like they live in a “world class” city.
You seem to think people won’t or shouldn’t be allowed to trade public services for cheaper housing. Well, why don’t we find out and let people decide for themselves? Why don’t you want to let people work it out for themselves? Why do you want to force a bunch of rules and rewards on them, like directing rats through a trap, to the promised land of one income, stay at home parents? You are sounding more like a John Howard conservative all the time 😉
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“why don’t we find out and let people decide for themselves?”
Aren’t they deciding for themselves ? with the two major parties offering much the same benefits, and with the likelihod of more to come. How often do we hear politicians from all parties talk of ‘family’friendly’ policies? There doesn’t seem much support for a private affluence – public squalor party – even the Greens seem more favoured!
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Dear oh dear. What a feeble document. I don’t disagree with every proposal in there, but a bit silly on the whole. The recurrence of the word ‘reasonable’ is quite funny given what we know about the authors.
Part 6 was the most bizarre. Most minimum wage workers are either (financially) junior partners and/or don’t have families – how can a ‘living wage’ be essential to family wellbeing? And what do ‘relativities’ and ‘rewards for skill’ have to do with families? Ridiculous.
Russell – if people want to marry and found a family, who is stopping them? Having a right to do something doesn’t mean having a right to social transfers after you’ve done it. It isn’t a logical argument.
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So Leopold – you don’t think there are problems in the workplace with people trying to be parents of babies and workers at the same time ?
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Russell, you are right of course, both major parties offer basically the same policy package, with very little to choose from. Politics is a popularity contest and an auction house rolled into one, the joke being that voters have let themselves be bribed with theire own coin, while at the same time having even less interest in politics itself. It may as well be coke versus pepsi.
Unfortunately, in a winner takes all environment of parliamentary democracy, there is no room left on the shelf for people who like to drink fanta or passiona. This is a pitfall of a system that is meant to give everyone a voice, but simply drowns out the voices of smaller groups.
You are right though, libertarian voices are small, and they are poorly represented. That doesn’t mean to say that there is nothing to be gained from considering alternative ways of organising the state. Once upon a time no one had heard of socialism, and yet it has become the new paradigm for almost 80 years now, be it the market social conservativism of the Liberal Party, or the market socialism of the ALP, or the plain social environmentalism of the Greens. Everywhere you look socialism, whether you like it or not.
Guys like you depress the hell out of me. I wonder if Clive Hamilton will put together a piece on the happiness index of frustrated libertarians and demand that statists give them rights too. After all, my political beliefs are as relatively as good as yours, aren’t they?
Democracy can be best described at its worst as two wolves and sheep deciding what’s for dinner.
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“After all, my political beliefs are as relatively as good as yours, aren’t they?”
Apparently we have to be tolerant Brendan, but not post-modern. I prefer mine.
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I’m glad you are so tolerant Russell and still let me be part of your collective socialist conservatist paradise 😉
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“so tolerant” – no, it’s the lingering effect of the Parable of the Good Shepherd – even you Brendan, will not be left out. Depressed you well may be, but we have created Medicare and the PBS so that you can be treated!
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Russell, I take care of my own health, thanks. That is why I’m an adult and pay for health insurance. Unfortunately, the existence of medicare prevents me from obtaining the type of insurance I’d prefer. Medicare well as well be short for mediocre healthcare.
I’m glad you can at least acknowledge that we’re all sheep under Australia’s current welfare state.
To be frank, I’d rather be left out and watch from the sidelines as socialism consumes the state as it collapses under the ever increasing burdens of meeting the welfare state’s infinite desires and its unrealised, as yet imagined, rights. Unfortunately I am constrained by collectivists to participate in the demise of the liberal civilisation we had the good fortune to inherit. A restaurant at the end of the welfare state, anyone?
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SOME NASTY, NARROW-MINDED, NEW RIGHT, NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS FOR RUSSELL
In post 34, Russell stated:
To be blunt, the only thing that has been “useless” in this discussion, Russell, has been your attempt to justify parental subisidies by applying the human rights label to them. When broken down (as done on the The maternal state thread), your “argument” amounts to little more than an assertion that parents should be subsidised because parenthood is the type of thing that you think should be subsidised. As I pointed out on that thread, you are entitled to think that, but it doesn’t constitute an argument.
Mutual insults aside, however, let’s address the issues about parents who could not afford to properly provide for their kids(at least at current income and consumption levels) without parental subsidies, and/or who would proceed to reproduce irregardless.
The first point to make is that, given today’s level of affluence, most parents in Australia could in fact afford to properly support their kids from their own incomes, including many on only a single income.* Of course, as others have pointed out, doing so would require that they cut back on other consumption, whether now or in the future. I have mentioned in previous posts that some parents may no longer be able to “have their kids and eat out too”, but of course for some it may require larger cut-backs than that; among other things, for example, some who currently own their own home may need to rent instead – at least if they want to have a large family. But that is simply a reflection of the costliness of having children; as previously pointed out, the fact that some things are costly does not per se mean they should attract a subsidy. The key point for the present, though, is that your objection is unlikely to apply to a significant proportion of parents or prospective parents – most parents could still afford to have children.
However, let’s suppose that a subset of people – say unpartnered women or jobless couples – had insufficient time and/or money to “afford” to have children without subsidies (in whatever form). And let’s accept for the moment your view that everyone should be able to have (and, at the expense of others if necessary, afford) at least two children if they want them. Would that then justify parental subisidies, at least for those parents? Again, unless you can provide some justification for favouring the choice to have children over the choice not to have children – and so far you haven’t – the answer is that it would not. Rather, logically it would be an argument for setting welfare payments for everyone who could not afford two children at a level that would allow anyone to afford them if they so chose. Otherwise, you would be discriminating against one set of poor people (ie the childless and poor) without a valid basis, creating horizontal inequities in the process.^
Finally, let’s consider the case in which, although all prospective parents could afford to have at least two children (either by cutting back their alternative consumption or by drawing on generally available welfare – in line with hoizontally equitable adjustments based on Russell’s apparant preferences), some who couldn’t afford subsequent children decided to continue to breed irregardless. I doubt that many parents would necessarily do that, particularly after a transition period coupled with disincentives (see below). However, Russell is right to raise the issue as no doubt at least a some would. What should happen then? First, it would indeed be appropriate to “tut tut” or in other ways socially sanction such parents – as we do most people who intentionally spend or make committments beyond their means. Beyond that, however, government would of course face a difficult trade-off, needing to intervene to protect the children’s needs while seeking to avoid subsiding their parents, and a ‘second best’ approach might indeed be to provide subisidies to the parents during the period in which their children remain dependent. However, there are other (complementary or alternative) options which could be pursued – including imposing expenditure restrictions on such parents, the HECS-style provision of parental loans rather than subsidies, community service orders or other legal sanctions for serial offenders, and the adoption of off-spring to infertile couples etc. While some of these measures may at present seem extreme to some, given many people unquestioning attitude towards the motherhood statements of the family lobby, it should be noted that our society already engages in the forced removal of children in some instances – indicating that we do not see parents’ “rights” to have access to their children as inalienable, or children’s “need” for their biological parents as sacrosanct. More forward thinkingly, as Rajat said in post 50 on the The maternal state thread:
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NOTES
* The extent to which changes such as the abolition of general parental subisidies affected the disposable income of parents would of course depend inter alia on the extent to which taxes also fell, and on any concommitant adjustments to other measures, such as (non-parental-status-related) welfare payments to address legitimate vertical equity concerns.
^ Of course, recognition of these implications might make one reconsider whether one really does think that everyone should be able to afford to have two children. However, I have retained Russell’s assumption for the purposes of the subsequent argument.
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Shorter Tom N: I hate those bludgers even though I have no evidence they are bludging, and single parent welfare mothers are the worst. You shouldn’t dress up prejudice in such a long post, it’s easier just to let it out quickly.
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Not even close, David.
However, in trying to demonstrate your wit, at least you were half successful.
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I hate pedantry, but Tom N, I think you meant regardless, not irregardless. I hate irregardless!
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