It is a pleasure interacting with you.
-Steve

Child bearing and child care has been a free cost borne by families and the cost was shifted forward with the social contract was that those children helped the parents in their old age. The cost was shifted forward. Invest in children and you children will forward invest in grandkids. Evolutionary sucess.

To get that I believe a social attitude of stigmatizing pre marital sex and bastardy and making incentives for marriage. Tax breaks for children much larger and for the spouse. Tax deductions for private schooling of children that type of incentives. Less government and more money left in American hands.

WE made smoking a social pariah so this could be easy if men were agreeable and women enforced on other women. Women are generally the enforcers of social rules.

But the libertarians hate the stigmatizing of sex except for procreation and they have a lot of support. So I do not see that social attitude changing for a while.

If the choice is “Evangelists” and “subservience” versus getting “compensated” to bear children, well, show one flash of a Tammy Faye Baker photo or play two minutes of a Jimmy Swaggart sermon and you’ll have every voting women of child-bearing age herded into the arms of tax-payer funded pre/post natal care – this, in addition to the paid daycare, medicare and primary and secondary education that taxpayers already provide.

If you were a single-mom with two kids – and another one on the way – which’d you choose?

So, similar to my response to Whiskey’s earnest feminization theory, I’d argue that you, too, are bending your thesis around urban media caricatures of women and womens’ “feelings” (I call this “dumbing feminine down”), and, insofar as you broadcast your thesis in such a stark, binary form, you risk exhibiting exactly the chauvinism that the academic left just as simplistically accuses “Men” of.

Why think in stark social categories, anyway? Aren’t there any Evangelist single mom’s on welfare? I say, let the academic wing of the anti-intellectual Left play that silly categories-game. While us regular humans get back to building America.

Women have more sex but control the result. No kids.

Read your Bible and it states that women are supposed to under control of their husband. So subservience is implied. Any long term husband may know the reality is otherwise if he wants a harmonious marriage.

Western civilization has empowered women but unless it continues to be strong western civilization will fail. All civilizations are fragile.

Part of our strength in America is the freedom that allowed ingenuity, will and drive to reap wealth. No taxes in colonial times helped a lot. Colonists were considered very wealthy by the common British soldier term. Food and comfort in plenty. Of course that took a lot of work but also no impediment except by Indians and nature.

The ability of someone to take an idea like Carrier did to develop AC was done and now AC is common everywhere. The combustion engine and the automobile made common through Ford so now anyone can have an auto. Standard Oil was able to create gas stations across the US in little time until anti monopolist government intervention stopped them. Bell took hi ideas, patented them and created a company that everyone uses his inventions. He got wealthy and so did his descendants. Railroads that crossed the country by the railroad barons. The great wealth unleashed by small governmrnt and ambition of smart men. Of course these men tried to consolidate and prevent new competition. Big business and big government go hand in hand to prevent competition.

We have ideals of freedom of opportunity so women have been allowed since the 1960’s to get degrees and work in industries not common back then and laws have changed so women are not restricted to get credit and loans. This is still very recent and these changes can be revoked. They have in Afghanistan, Iran and Indonesia, Pakistan and most Muslim countries. Women were freer in Saudi Arabia in the 1950’s then in the 21st century.

I am not advocating the restriction of freedom for women or more emancipation. Just that women’s freedom and contraceptives have allowed women the choice to have children or not. Unless the woman is compelled or supported she often will refuse to have children. The cost to have children alone are very high and most women who want children can not afford the cost until they are out of reproductive age unless they get married at younger ages and have the support of a husband. The destruction of marriage has led to a decline in children among the yuppie class.

Our Social Security depends on the creation of offspring to support us in our old age. Yet those boomers failed to have enough children to do that. We like Europeans have been dependant on immigration to provide that extra population.

Obama’s assumption goes out the window without future generations to pay off the debt he is incurring. So this is a serious issue and thinking how to resolve it is a good idea. Unless we can think off a way to make efficiency like in farming were 2% could pay for all our debt. Maybe these paper pushers were trying just that and they failed.

“So unless we want to accept the evangelical idea that women should be subservient to men, women are going to refuse to have children unless compensated with societal value or money.”

For some reason I am tweaked by this dichotomy, RAH. It could be its first “subservient” peg that irks. Slave=Women, Master=Man: this restates my Feminist professor’s thesis perfectly, and I vehemently reject it. Or is it the second one presuming society’s financial compensation must be copulation’s only alternate catalyst? This posits that women, consequentially, must be paid currency to conceive.

Since neither seems particularly primal, it could be both that bother.

I think that Nature’s got a bigger say in things than your limiting binary allows. Just like capitalism, DNA always burrows under social barricades in the end, no matter what the specs on our social-engineers’ plans may say.

Account for Nature’s inexorable drives, and tally the labor-saving and psychic gains (like social security, responsibility, campus) that come with procreation, and I think it’ll fill out your bipartite conjecture a bit.

Any homeowner has a pipe break will call a plumber or try it themmselves. Failure of the AC in the summer and a call is made and that service is valuable to the homeowner or business. Same with failure of heat in the winter.

You car breaks doen so you take it to the mechanic a service tech.

But services are dependent on the wealth of the client base. When clients are poorer then they call less on services. If client lose their jobs they do not buy extra services.

Those small business lay off extra employees and reduce their own spending and the squeeze is on. That is the situation today.

Manufacturers reduce inventories and production if no one can buy the products. Ao the big layoffs at Caterpillar and GM and all the other big manufaturers.

Managers that are excessive are laid off. Paper pushers are reduced and those thatare left do more with same pay. Because they are afraid of the next lay off.

So unless we want to accept the evangelical idea that women should be subservient to men, women are going to refuse to have children unless compensated with societal value or money. After all they sacrifice 9 –12 month being pregnant and initial time with the child and then 20 years bringing up the child with all those costs. Men have not picked up the costs either monetary or labor since there are a large number of fatherless children. Many of that deliberately by the mother’s choice.

Most of the numbers of white children produced are done by teenage white girls of working class parents. Same culture as the Hispanics who work hard and have children young. Bristol Palin is an example of a working class family culture and she could not wait to have sex and get pregnant. She probably thought the pregnancy would guarantee the fidelity of her boyfriend, which is often the reason that girls choose to get pregnant. Funny thing is that the male rarely stay around anyway since they are way too immature to be steady fathers and their taste in girls change, as they grow older.

After the first teenage pregnancy and the rapid maturity of having to provide; those girls wait until they find a good father and husband before they get pregnant again. Marriage as an institution was supposed to solve that, but most teenagers will have children but refuse marriage.

So a less material world may increase the value of men as providers and strong enough to protect their women and children. Maybe this recession will push it that direction, but I doubt it.

As long as women do not have to depend on men there will be less children. If society had provided the mothers with the monetary value of the true cost of having and caring for a child then women may have more kids indiscriminately. But we have long argued against welfare for non-working moms and the requirement for work for moms reduce the childbearing capability.

If we want more children born increase the stigma for illegitimacy and more children will be born and make divorce harder. But also require better protection for wives and children in marriage laws.

The dissolution of marriage that gays are pushing by broadening the definition of marriage is not helpful. But many gays are anti children and disparage women as “breeders” So pro gay attitudes also reduce children born. Are the libertarians going to go for these ideas? I do not think so. All these proscriptions are anti freedom. That is why they work under Muslim and authoritarian ideologies.

Remember, guys, that you can’t discuss what ails America’s manufacturing sector without keeping the layers and layers of environmental regulations piled on the energy and manufacturing industries since the early seventies firmly in mind.

Even service sectors like transportation which utilize energy were subject to legislated perversions. In short, no matter how effective your manufacturing, construction or transportation business plan was in, say, 1978, the unpredictable artificial price-increases that wet-lands preservation, Coastal Commissions, CAFE standards and drilling moratoriums that emit from increasingly abstract legislation are sure to have obsoleted it by now.

Study rent-seeking by uncompetitive firms in Europe, and you may begin to wonder whether impacting a competitor’s biz plan isn’t the legislators’ desired outcome.

Which leads me to one critique of Steyn’s observation vis the financial sector: the rent-seeking that overloaded the system was mediated by government regulators motivated by similarly abstract welfarism. Otherwise, his points are right on.

Environmentalism and welfarism are the wheels on the Left’s market-busting bike. Let’s make sure that, as we delve into the whys, wheres and whos of the economic melt-down, we shove a stick into the spokes of the Left’s wheels.