Two MSNBCs In One

Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

On Thursday’s “NOW w/Alex Wagner” on MSNBC, MSNBC contributor and managing editor of The Grio Joy Reid charged that Republicans oppose elements of the controversial immigration reform bill out of desire for indentured servitude and to prevent what she called “brown people” from becoming U.S. citizens.

“I mean, didn’t we do this before?” Reid said at the opening of the show. “Wasn’t it called indentured servitude, right, where you come and pay all this money out and you are not a citizen, but you’re legally allowed to work on the farm?

— As quoted by the Daily Caller today.

Didn’t we do this before? Why yes we did. Just this past April, when MSNBC seemed pretty darn cool with the notion of indentured servitude. Or as host Melissa Harris-Perry said in an ad promoting her network, “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents:”

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[MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry’s] statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”

The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

— From Rich Lowry in April at NRO.  “Your Kids Aren’t Your Own — The family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort.”

 Related: Blogger “Dalrock,” exploring some of the ideas in Dr. Helen’s new Men on Strike book asks, “How should we replace marriage as our organizing philosophy of the family?”

Simply put, the purpose of child support is to replace marriage.  Discussing how it should be implemented is discussing how to replace marriage.  Some might argue that this is a good thing, either as a rare exception (say for a husband who abandons his family) or as a rule (as practiced in the western world).  But this doesn’t change the fact that child support is working exactly as designed, and exactly as should be expected.  Child support crowds out marriage, and even in cases where weddings still technically occur the option for the wife to unilaterally convert the family from a marriage based family to a child support based family always exists.  This is part of the threatpoint designed to empower wives and dis-empower husbands.  Men simply don’t have the option to choose the marriage based model over the child support model.

Or as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air, “Charles Murray asks the $64,000 question for American Enterprise Institute, and issues a challenge. What changes in American cultural and economic life are successes, and which need to be ‘mourned?'”

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Murray notes that we need to think carefully on these topics as America is increasingly dismantled by a rapacious and punitive left. Certainly more carefully than is allowed on MSNBC.