The statistic is this. In the UK the cost of state welfare totals £207 billion a year. But total receipts from income tax total £155 billion a year.
In other words, when someone pays their income tax in the UK they are not even getting to pay for defence or schools or hospitals. Everything they pay is eaten up by the welfare bill.
There has to be a welfare net of some sort, but the current one doesn't seem sustainable. Peter Hitchens is right, I think, to wonder in particular if the growth of fatherlessness can really be supported in the long-term:
I might add...that there are now 567,000 fatherless households being subsidised by the taxpayer. Look at these figures and gasp. Where is the cash to come from?Hitchens has a point when he concludes:
The new political elite, who hope to buy votes and power through handing out other people’s money, will not stop doing so until that money runs out.
And so we ramble merrily towards the edge of the abyss, making lemmings look responsible and far-sighted.
Without fathers to enforce discipline on the children and to lead the family and also to provide for the family the state has the opportunity to act as the father. With the state acting as the father, there is now loyalty to the state and now the state politicians can say "He's going to take away your food you poor poor ignorant person" leaving the single mothers voting for the sugar daddy.
ReplyDeletethere are now 567,000 fatherless households being subsidised by the taxpayer. Look at these figures and gasp. Where is the cash to come from?
ReplyDeleteLet the bastard spawn of female empowerment die in the gutter.
Feh: Let the bastard spawn of female empowerment die in the gutter.
ReplyDelete-
They probably won't vote for that.
What they might vote for, tacitly, in an atmosphere of great ethnic trust and solidarity, is for themselves to do a bit worse so that they can be part of a tribe that is doing better.
You can't do that without trust, otherwise they will reasonably fear that what you are really moving towards is the "die in the gutter" option.
Trust is hard to come by when you've been betrayed by your own parents, particularly when "your" state has indoctrinated and incentivized your mother to do the wrong thing by your father and you, which is a common situation.
Fake happy talk won't do. There has to be some meat and bone on this trust, some real and credible bond.
If I remember my reading right, in Australia banking used to work a bit like this. The banks paid derisory amounts of interest on small accounts, not "real market" rates, which greatly disadvantaged the poor, but with the money they were ripping off the banks offered good rates for young home-buyers, subsidizing family formation. With a strong sense that everybody had a real interest in that - which they did, as Australia was a mono-racial and mono-ethnic society - society's poorest and most vulnerable tacitly accepted a system where they were a bit worse off as individuals, but a lot better off in ways that in the era of formal "White Australia" they would not have been embarrassed to own and underline.
Getting people to pay for benefits for people who are in racial and ethnic terns their rivals, or getting them to give up benefits they already have so that racial and ethnic rivals that are better off than them can thrive and increase their numbers more is another matter. The "bowling alone" effect cuts in with a vengeance.
This a good illustration of the consequences of sexual liberation. But liberals use contraception and abortion as a way to avoid these consequences.
ReplyDeleteFeh, now tell us what you really think!
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons for the fatherlessness issue is this.
A society can choose different ways of encouraging the well-being of children.
Traditionally, the Western way was to encourage stable family formation, with families headed by a father and with parents and siblings committed to looking after each other.
That worked well, but it did mean that the relatively small number of children brought up outside such stable families were worse off.
A liberal society finds it difficult to operate this way, in part because liberals think that the very definition of being a human hinges on our ability to pursue a self-made life. Therefore, if individuals don't have equal life conditions it is thought that they are being treated as less human.
So liberals are willing to use the resources of the state to attempt to overcome any detriment to being born outside of the traditional support structure.
But the problem is that the more you overcome such detriment, the more viable you make the non-traditional arrangements.
Liberals have issues with the traditional family anyway, and so haven't been that worried about the growth of single mother families.
But it's possible that the growing cost will finally make them worry. I notice that even the ALP here in Australia has made tentative steps to attempting a reform of the welfare system.
Westerners for a while now have been left to believe that their actions as individuals remain isolated from the society they live in. This is Proof that even what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom has very public consequences.
ReplyDeleteWhen the government spends more than it takes in, the difference is made up for by inflation. Inflation is a tax, basically, so there is no "free ride".
ReplyDeleteWhen western welfare systems were originally established, they were biased in favour of married couples and included work obligations.
ReplyDeleteMales only received unemployment benefits if they participated in work schemes (which no longer exist) Single mothers were excluded from benefits.
We need to reintroduce incentives for stable family formation, and punitive penalties for unstable family formation. For example, allow poor working families in state houses to participate in right to buy schemes but deny such schemes to solo parents.
However, pragmatic policies just won't be adopted while liberal non-judgmentalism rules the day.