"Many people argue that they don't want their tax money to support other people having babies. That is a selfish and ignorant stance. We ALL benefit from supporting a future generation"

Sigh! This is the seflish and ignorant stance from entilement-poisoned santimonious cabal who extol their faux-altruism to justify their "right" to have their baby and maintain their pre-baby lifestyle.

The Harvester Decision may have upheld the notion that a minimum wage ought to be enough to "keep a man, his wife and his children in *frugal* confort" but it also entrenched the notion that women ought to paid less than men because they did not have a family. The demands for the plethora of cash handouts for people with children is perverse variant of the Harvester decision; that people without children ought to be paid less that people with children because they do not have a family to support. The squirming and inconvenient truth is, currently, Australia has the SECOND HIGHEST cash handouts (as a proportion of GDP to people with children among OECD nations after Luxembourg. http://www.oecd.org/document/4/0,3343,en_2649_34819_37836996_1_1_1_1,00.html)

And before the accusations are trotted out, I am not aiming this at the stereotyped low socio-economic demograph or single parents but, rather, the arrogant professional couples who oh-so-rightly demand their slice of middle-class welfare so that they can keep up the mortgage repayments on their ill-chosen large home.

Nor I am not asking that children be made to starve in the streets (incidently, recent stats show that those most likely to be starving in the streets ARE the single-childless and not families with children). I strongly believe in hand-ups to address socio-economic disadvantage but I certainly oppose handouts to the wealthy.

I am not suggesting that parents ought to raise children with no support at all. I oppose the notion that as upholding the private wealth of parents is deserved as a matter of course, and this can only be achieved through compensatory monetary arrangements and it is morally acceptable to redistribute incomes by penalising the childless to achieve this.

Instead, parents should be able to access social services aimed at making them better parents and I have no argument that social wealth is of long term benefit to me and society. It would be a far more effective expeditute of government resources.

In truth, parenthood is a personal lifestyle choice, with costs and consequences, rewards and sacrifice. Provided fertility can be controlled, and abortion available where contraception fails, having a family is just as much a valid choice as not having one. That is, children are a private good and their benefits are enjoyed mostly by their parents.

While the childless are no way responsible for the arguable financial adversity said to be experienced by the child-burdened, the entitlement-poisoned lobbyists see no moral shame in exacting financial adversity upon the childless because, in their twisted logic , punishing the childless fiscally or imposing some perverse noblesse oblige will address this confected or imagined inequity.

A taxpayer-funded maternity leave policy is not pro-women. It is a pro-certain types of women, namely mothers So much for the myth of sisterhood. Clearly, for the feminists, some women are more equal than others.

Posted by Deliberately Barren Jezebel, 05/03/2010 5:20pm (2 years ago)