Left and Right, Family and Economics
by Ross Douthat
MARCH 17, 2015 11:38 AM
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/left-and-right-family-and-economics/?comments#permid=14439556
Both the Brooks and now the Douthat postings are exercises in self-gratification - to show how erudite, well read and great debaters they are - but ultimately it is nothing but hot air.
No one with an ounce of honesty will claim to be able to identify "cause-effect" relationships in social phenomena from the observed statistical correlations. And so it is with the chicken-egg question of "decline of family values" versus "poverty" issue. Ultimately for conservatives the arguments boils down to finding rationals for their arguments against "redistribution", and in the case of Douthat, the quite insidious implication that the source for all problems, both family breakdowns and poverty, lies in the availability of abortion. Note that the bill to fight "human trafficking" is failing because of the insane conservatives insistence that no funds be spent on abortion - these young girls are more than likely pregnant because of rape in one form or the other.
Anyway, it does not really matter if "decline in family values" or "poverty" is the root of the problem, as a practical matter it only matters where policy and programs can be designed to combat the ultimate visible effect - a large and growing, seemingly permanent under-class of people caught in poverty - without infringing on freedom of choice. Douthat seems to think that by re-outlawing abortion, suddenly we will have no more out-of-wedlock births, and "The Brady Bunch" will again (if it ever was) become the automatic norm.
No one with an ounce of honesty will claim to be able to identify "cause-effect" relationships in social phenomena from the observed statistical correlations. And so it is with the chicken-egg question of "decline of family values" versus "poverty" issue. Ultimately for conservatives the arguments boils down to finding rationals for their arguments against "redistribution", and in the case of Douthat, the quite insidious implication that the source for all problems, both family breakdowns and poverty, lies in the availability of abortion. Note that the bill to fight "human trafficking" is failing because of the insane conservatives insistence that no funds be spent on abortion - these young girls are more than likely pregnant because of rape in one form or the other.
Anyway, it does not really matter if "decline in family values" or "poverty" is the root of the problem, as a practical matter it only matters where policy and programs can be designed to combat the ultimate visible effect - a large and growing, seemingly permanent under-class of people caught in poverty - without infringing on freedom of choice. Douthat seems to think that by re-outlawing abortion, suddenly we will have no more out-of-wedlock births, and "The Brady Bunch" will again (if it ever was) become the automatic norm.
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