The government loans me my children

Here's a proposal so wrong-headed in so many ways I hardly know how to begin.  Kristin Wartman's NYT Op-ed observes that:
The home-cooked family meal is often lauded as the solution for problems ranging from obesity to deteriorating health to a decline in civility and morals.
Well!  That certainly identifies the high stakes.  What to do?  We're way too busy to cook, even those of us who stay home.  And it's expensive to buy fresh food!  We need affordability and convenience, but without sacrificing good looks, health, civility, or morals.   Fantasy economics comes to the rescue.   Remember in the early days of feminism the proposals for housewives to earn salaries?  Acknowledging that "[i]t’s nearly impossible for a single parent or even two parents working full time to cook every meal from scratch, planning it beforehand and cleaning it up afterward," Wartman notes that families "of means" just hire outsiders to take care of these problems.  But then what happens to the obese, unhealthy, uncivil, and immoral children of the paid housekeepers?

Something Must Be Done, and as usual, it takes the form of totally misunderstanding what salaries are for, as in "money that one person (or group) gives to another for performing a service that the first person (or group) values enough to pay money for it."  Here, it obviously wouldn't help much for the husband or the children to pay the wife a salary for putting a fresh, healthy dinner on the table and then washing the dishes.   Evidently it doesn't count that the husband deposits his salary into the household account and pays the bills.  What to do?   Somehow I knew it would involve tax subsidies, tax penalties, and the phrase "sugary foods," and Wartman did not disappoint:
Stay-at-home parents should qualify for a new government program while they are raising young children—one that provides money for good food, as well as education on cooking, meal planning and shopping—so that one parent in a two-parent household, or a single parent, can afford to be home with the children and provide wholesome, healthy meals.  These payments could be financed by taxing harmful foods, like sugary beverages, highly caloric, processed snack foods and nutritionally poor options at fast food and other restaurants.  Directly linking a tax on harmful food products to a program that benefits health would provide a clear rebuttal to critics of these taxes.  Business owners who argue that such taxes will hurt their bottom lines would, in fact, benefit from new demand for healthy food options and from customers with money to spend on such foods.
Progressives are so cute when they try to talk about market principles.  See, it makes sense for the taxpayers to pay mom's salary, because business owners benefit when families demand healthy food options at the store! Also, we need "workplace policies that incentivize health, like 'health days' that employees could use for health-promoting activities:  shopping for food, cooking, or tending a community garden."   I guess there's not much a family should supply for itself by deciding that it's important and paying for it with money the family brings in by doing valuable work for outsiders.  If it needs to be done at all, the taxpayers should fund it.  Probably best if the government mandates it, too, just to be sure, because you can never be sure that most parents will take care of their children out of love, duty, or simple self-interest.

One thing I don't understand is why the tax subsidy would be limited to families with young children.  Don't older children deserve to avoid obesity, illness, incivility, and immorality?  What about middle-aged people who don't have parents any more?

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

That proposal is straight out of Lenin's proposals for the early Soviet Union. Just add in the paid housekeepers who go from apartment to apartment, cleaning for the women who are working in the factories and collective farms, and the dining halls for all of the workers' meals, and it's 1921 all over again. *shudder*

LittleRed1

Gringo said...

According to some people, for every problem, there is a solution which involves legislation and government money. Which will solve things just fine. All the time.

In my years as a college student I worked two years as an aide in a psych hospital and in an institution for the mentally retarded. I made two conclusions. First, funds are always limited, so there will never be enough money to do all the program wants to do. Second, spending money on a social program does not necessarily mean the problem will be solved. While proponents of a social program may claim that funding a given social problem will solve the problem it is intended to solve, the actual results are quite often in disagreement with such a claim.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

She's got that whole correlation is not causation thing mixed up again. The people who get this food-and-home organisation idea right have children who succeed. Genes likely have some play in that.

Bringing in people to do work for parents might improve their children at the margins, but it's unlikely to pay any big dividends for society. LittleRed1 - not accidental that the soviets thought people, and thus society, could be made over with a little extra planning.

Worked great on paper.

Anonymous said...

AVI - that's what I was explaining to my students a few weeks ago. Communism works very well on paper, and is much more fair than capitalism, on paper. The trouble is that it never stays on paper. I did point out that monasteries work because they are small and everyone is there of their own free will. The question came up during a lesson about China and the Soviet Union after 1945.

LittleRed1

Grim said...

Monasteries have also played an often-underappreciated part in the development of market capitalism. The religious orders played a huge role in the construction of early water mills, as they could benefit from a large pool of capital to build new mills. The proceeds then went partially to the monastery, and partially back to the overarching order (which allowed them to construct other mills).

The Medieval Catholic Church is probably worth looking at for an example of mixing capitalism and the communistic impulse that so many people obviously feel. It worked quite well, but as you said, it operated entirely on free will and voluntary participation. There is probably also something to do with the idea that the personal sacrifices voluntarily adopted were pleasing to God.

Eric Blair said...

I'm thinking that a whole lot of serfs who owed work days to church lands might have something else to say about the concept of 'voluntary'.

Grim said...

That's what I mean by the role of monastic systems in helping to give rise to market capitalism. Of course they participated in the pre-market-capitalist system if they helped to give rise to that system. But insofar as they did, that is what they had in common with earlier systems.

What they did that was transformative was to increase the availability of capital. That meant there were extra goods that could be sold at market. That, in turn, gave rise to what you might call a market for markets: the underlying drive to establish new towns in the Norman period in England, for example, was to provide the king with additional revenue and manpower independent of the feudal lords. But the reason such towns could be set up at all was that you could make a living in a town with a market, rather than starving because all hands were needed to grow enough food.

It was, of course, those towns that provided an escape from serfdom: if you could live for a year and a day in a town, you were a free man. So here is another kind of voluntary road that was opened by the rise of capital and the markets that capital enabled.

E Hines said...

Communism works very well on paper, and is much more fair than capitalism, on paper.

Define "fair." I've never seen communism as fairer than capitalism, even on paper. Communism denies every man the opportunity to show the best that there is in him and to reap the rewards of the suite of skill, talent, luck, and work ethic that is included in that best.

Eric Hines

raven said...

Communism is feudalism in disguise.
It's sole purpose is to cement the master-serf relationship, and restrict social mobility while hiding behind a veil of "fairness". (how I hate that term. As bad as "common sense".)
Now one would think that any Lord would be happy to promote an agenda that would increase the net wealth of his country. But that course of action can empower the serfs. The evidence from North Korea and similar hellholes is that the Masters can live their fantasy perfectly well in a wasteland- when the Masters are few, a small coin from each peasant will suffice to fund them.

Anonymous said...

Eric H, I was teaching 7th graders, so fair means "everyone gets taken care of, and no one is supposed to get more or less than anyone else." That kind of "fair."

Eric B., I was talking about people in modern monasteries, since these kids have not talked about the feudal system since, oh, last semester. Junior High world civ doesn't always lend itself to nuance. :)

LittleRed1

MikeD said...

Eric H, I was teaching 7th graders, so fair means "everyone gets taken care of, and no one is supposed to get more or less than anyone else." That kind of "fair."

That kind of "fair" is only "fair" if everyone puts in equal amount of effort supporting society. One of the dilemmas I've yet to see any communist (or other who demands equal wages for all) explain why in the world anyone would work in a sewage treatment plant if they could make the exact same pay as a street musician, bartender, waitress, hotel desk clerk, or person sitting on their porch watching the neighbors go by. Why would you work in a nasty, horrible work environment (which is still important work) if you could make The Salary (or Living Wage, if you prefer) doing literally ANYTHING else?

No one makes more or less than anyone else? Then why should I ever work in heavy manual labor if I could be a programmer? "Well you might be a bad programmer!" Ok, let's say I am. So what? Under the "fair" system, I get paid no more or less than the world's BEST programmer. After all, it wouldn't be "fair" for me to be paid less. Even if not a single line of code I write will compile.

Texan99 said...

I, too, have a problem with "fair means no one gets more or less than anyone else." It's true that, if I make dinner for six guests, all equally hungry and equally situated in terms of caloric needs and tastes, it would strike me the wrong way to distinguish among the portions I offered them. But that's an awful model for most interactions in public life. The government isn't our host, it doesn't own the food, and it doesn't have a bunch of identical guests asking to be passively fed.

Different people get more or less from me all the time, which is how it should be.

Grim said...

"Communism is feudalism in disguise."

That's really unfair to feudalism. :)

E Hines said...

Eric H, I was teaching 7th graders, so fair means "everyone gets taken care of, and no one is supposed to get more or less than anyone else." That kind of "fair."

Sorry, LR1, that's more a comment on the devolution of parenting and our education system than it is on the meaning of "fair."

In the first place, those are two entirely separate and unrelated things (leaving aside the question-begging lack of definition of "taken care of").

When I was in the 7th grade, we already knew--without teacher prompting--that everyone getting no more or less than anyone else was distinctly unfair.

Eric Hines

Tom said...

Well, I certainly feel grateful to certain entrepreneurial monasteries for several good beers, wines, bread, and music.

The question of how to define fairness is an interesting one. What is "fair" in capitalism, I wonder.

Texan99 said...

"What is 'fair' in capitalism, I wonder."

I'm never totally sure what people mean by "capitalism"; sometimes it refers to the idea of rewarding those who accumulate capital and then put it to use for a fee. In other words, acknowledging that storing up the promises of future work/goods (which is what money is, in essence) is a useful task, on a par with providing current labor or managerial skill. Anyway, it's pretty clear to me about what's fair about that approach. If the promises mean something, they're valuable. Lending them to an operation is valuable.

Sometimes "capitalism" really refers more to the free market. I already write so much about that here that I won't repeat it except to say that it seems fair to me to let relative strangers fix for themselves the terms on which they'll supply goods and services to each other. If there's something unfair about that, it has to do with requiring people to reciprocate, when sometimes they're not able to. But I call that an argument for charity, not fairness.

E Hines said...

Speaking from the exalted position of ex cathedra in umbilico, my own view of capitalism centers on Tex's second paragraph above, as guided by Adam Smith. Thus, the aspect contained in Tex's first paragraph is simply one outcome of capitalism, rather than being capitalism.

From that, it seems to me that capitalism doesn't presume to address "fairness" per se, that's just another result of two (simplistically) men coming together each one letting his greed and his practicality take the two of them to an agreed exchange. With a law or two that says neither can coerce or deceive the other.

That aspect of capitalism, of not presuming to define what is fair, is one of its great strengths.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

I apologize for not doing a better job with the students and for using the term "fair." The question caught me off-guard, and I was subbing, so I did not have time to prepare a better way to try and explain the ideals of communism versus the ideals of free-market capitalism, while still trying to cover the material the teacher had asked me to cover. You are all correct in that there are much, much better ways to explain the problems of different economic systems. I was trying to take advantage of one of those "teachable moments" that sometimes bubble up, and I had not planned on covering that particular topic.

LittleRed1

raven said...

Grim said
That's really unfair to feudalism. :)

That's true, we can start a Affirmative Feudalism Program to address any inequities.

E Hines said...

Need a disparate impact analysis first, so we can better target the AFP.

Eric Hines