Freight Dog:
Rjan:
Odd days:
£8 or £20 an hour it’s what you take home that counts. I think one of the most unfair things is tax credits. How can it be fair for 2 people to do exactly the same work but one takes home more because they are claiming tax credits for 4 kids and the other has no kids. Top that off with family allowance and one worker is miles in front of the other on take home money for no extra work. Is this fair ?
Raising kids is valuable and necessary work.
No it isn’t. Complete and utter rubbish. I’ve never heard such tosh in my life. Normal ivory tower justification from people who love to bang on about how wonderful and enlightened they are because they have kids. Having kids whichever way you skin it is just a self centered thing. They don’t exist until you create them. “You have them because you want to love them”, or “you have them because you want to create an image of you as a couple”. Whatever, all self centred reasons. Accept and at least be honest. People don’t breed for the greater good, complete rubbish. It’s because they want to!
We seem to be arguing at cross purposes. What I’m saying is that reproduction (which has cultural as well as biological aspects) is systematically necessary and systematically valuable, and therefore it is completely wrongheaded when anyone goes down the road of arguing that it can (or even worse, should) be foregone, or that its benefits accrue only to the individual parents.
I eat almost entirely because, on a psychological level, it is pleasurable to myself - that does not negate the fact that it is imperative in our society that individuals are motivated to eat, and that they are enabled to eat by the sufficient provision of food.
When people lack the intrinstic motivation to eat (such as victims of stroke, some infectious diseases, the mentally ill, and so on), we bear down on them to compel them to eat - even by forced feeding tube if necessary, or rectal infusion. The basic assumption that people are motivated and enabled to eat, and thereby maintain their lives, is a foundation on which much is built. Our way of life couldn’t continue if we couldn’t be sure most people would still be here in 3 days time and wouldn’t decide to starve to death.
When people are not enabled to eat despite possessing the motivation, that is a serious problem for individuals, but en masse, if people are not enabled to eat, it is a famine crisis - one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Translated to reproduction, if anyone asks “why should I have to pay for children?”, the real question is on what basis should they be allowed not to pay for children? In much the same way we ask, on what basis should people be able to opt out of paying for food production, or opt out of maintaining a breathable environment of air?
Even from the tenets of a really selfish and self-contained person, are you willing to go all Ray Mears at the end of the world which arrives in your later years, and fight it out in the wasteland for scraps of rat-meat and raw cockroach? Of course, like a bank run, once a significant number of people believe the end is coming, then the end comes immediately. If reproduction were abolished, you’d be fighting it out for rat-meat within the week - because people don’t go gently into the night, they rage against the dying of the light.
All this “raising kids well is a sacrifice and bla bla”. Well that’s like creating a problem to solve. The problem couldn’t exist if you hadn’t bred.
No, if the problem with children did not exist, then we would have different, substantially greater problems - and therefore any allusion to the idea that ceasing to have children is a solution to the problem of children, is misapprehending the scale of the problem which children are designed to solve, namely the maintenance and stability of our way of life. There can be no mass opting-out of setting aside sufficient provision in our society to enable reproduction.
As for the good of society we can see the harm done by over breeding the human populous is far negating the neec for creating more humans just on the off chance you breed an Einstein. Notice any shortage of men and women around here? It’s not post WW1 after all the males were killed off. When we get short of children and workers you’ll get a memo.
Pure neo-Malthusian nonsense. Our population is not over-breeding, and in fact the highest biological reproductive rates (and the highest growth rates) are in the undeveloped and developing world, whereas the settled populations of the developed world reproduce biologically at slightly less than a maintenance rate (the developed world currently supports it’s cultural reproduction by importing babies and willing parents, and then socialising them into a society that is different from the society which enabled those births or created that willingness).
