“The nation hungers for just such behavior” | Wizbang
This is so clearly true that the only real question is: why don’t they? If marriage and religion give smart people joy and improve their living standards, why don’t they spread the word?
I believe one reason is the Tyranny of Hip: the unwillingness of grownups to be thought of as uncool.
This is mostly socon wetdreaming, especially the religion part. You won’t find religion more widely spread than in the churches of the ghettos where these malignancies flourish the most.
Look, it is relatively simple. Graduate from high school, get a job, keep it, get married, and stay married. You won’t live a life of poverty and degradation.
Yet it is the very folks who claim to mean well who wreak the most destruction on the poor. Here’s a truth from the Copybook Headings: You get what you pay for.
Our society chooses to pay for bastards and wonders why the number of bastards increases. Our society refuses to support poor families with married fathers in residence, and wonders why the number of single mothers increases. Our society pays for single motherhood, and wonders why we get it. Our society gives stipends to unemployed and/or homeless males, and wonders why we get more and more of them.
Why on earth would any of the poor pay attention to “cultural signals” when the check that comes to them pays for exactly the opposite?
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
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Gee, Bill, you sound just like Rick Santorum!
No, I sound just like Walter Williams, who, unlike Saint Satan Santorum, is a libertarian.
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Your main point of “you get (more of) what you pay for” is bang on.
But I’m not sure that I agree with you and Walter Williams about the proven method of getting ahead. In modern America, marriage is a crap-shoot for the man. If the woman decides the marriage is over, she’ll get the lion’s share of the family assets. Prenuptial agreements? Yah, maybe they’ll be upheld… if they’re not deemed “unfair”. If she claims, falsely and with no evidence whatsoever, that her husband struck her, she can get a no-questions-asked restraining order and he’ll be lucky not to be arrested. (And she can expect no penalty whatsoever for filing a false report, even if she admits it to a judge.)
And if there are children involved, the soon-to-be-former husband might as well give up any hope of having any money for the next 20 years.
I’m trying to (teasingly) suggest that SoCons like Santorum and libertarians like Williams have more in common than you think Bill. All that social disfunction is inimical to the interests of everyone not on the left.
I get that, Ernst. The fly in the ointment is how libertarians would achieve those results, versus how statist socons like Santorum would.
Remember the statist mantra: It’s for your own good that we force you to do this.
The matter isn’t as important as the means used to achieve it.
I think you’re overstating the extent to which Santorum is prepared to use the coercive power of the state myself.
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