It's The Children, Stupid

The problem with Old Europe is that it is literally getting old. That’s because the Europeans aren’t having many children, writes Robert Samuelson.

The number of children per woman is called the “total fertility rate,” or TFR. Here are the estimated 2005 TFRs for some major countries: Germany, 1.4; Greece, 1.3; Italy, 1.3; Japan, 1.4; Spain, 1.3; and Russia, 1.3.

The low fertility rates translate into declining population. Here is a table of population predictions from Samuelson’s article.

POPULATION (Millions) 2005 2050 Germany 82.4 73.6 Italy 58.1 50.4 Japan 127.4 99.9 Spain 40.3 35.6

But there’s an exception to this trend of population decline. The United States. In the US the fertility rate is 2.1, exactly at replacement rate.

Nor does the U.S. rate merely reflect, as some think, a higher rate among Hispanic Americans. The fertility rate is 1.9 for non-Hispanic whites and about 2 for African-Americans, reports demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. What explains the American exception? Eberstadt cites three differences with Europe and most other advanced countries: greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values.

And don’t forget that the low fertility rate for whites includes childless liberal cities like San Francisco and Seattle.

We’ve looked at this issue here at the Road to the Middle Class before, and we’ll look at it again. One reason for high birth rates in the US may be patriarchy. You need to give people a reason to knuckle down to the hard work of raising children in a family and patriarchy is one way to mobilize both men and women to the task. As Phillip Longman argues:

Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society — nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

It’s a constant struggle for young men to decide between the demands of society and the allure of those flute girls. The way that society puts a finger on the scales to push young men and women towards child production is by promoting patriarchy.

Let's Hear It For Capitalism

When your kid comes home from her government school today, she will probably be parroting some nonsense they taught her. At school these days, writes James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In,

They teach that capitalists destroy rainforests, insidiously control American foreign policy and spread the human vices of greed and selfishness. Anti-capitalism is now the subtext of history and geography lessons, as well as politics, economics and sociology. Capitalism is said to have given rise to slavery. The state is depicted as a hero that has tempered the cruelty of the beast with laws, regulations and interventions.

All lies, of course. Nor is it true that capitalism “promotes inequality” except in the sense that it rewards people who give other people what they want.

Let us rehearse three big things that capitalism has done, in food, clothing, and cars. Capitalism, not government.

Two centuries ago, food was the biggest part in a family's budget. It was hard for a poor family to get enough to eat. Even in the 1920s, people on average spent a third of their income on food.



Now they spend only a tenth... Shortages, hunger and famine became history. That is what capitalism did. To sneer at it is to sneer at the abolition of hunger in this country.

Then there is clothing. Used to be that the poor could hardly afford any clothes. Today,

new and much cheaper methods of production have been put in place by individuals importing cotton, improving textile production techniques, deploying new kinds of transport and distributing the raw material and final products more cheaply. No longer do children share shoes.

Not government. Capitalism. And as for cars. Well, we know how many cars they had in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and today in Castro’s Cuba.

Who invented cars? Who refined their design and manufacture to the point where they are affordable by millions of people? Not governments. The diverse, resourceful, determined power of capitalism.

And it goes on and on. The astonishing thing is that, in the light of this overwhelming evidence, there are still so many people that worship the state and their benefits. What are they thinking?

They are thinking that it is much easier to demand your rights using the political system than to earn it by serving the consumer.

At Least President Bush is Brave

Nobody can tell if President Bush will turn out to be one of our greatest presidents, writes Michael Novak. But we do know one thing. He has to be our bravest president.

He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years...



He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

And now, of course, we conservatives are getting tired of him, tired of defending him, and tired of the dangers of the times.

It takes more bravery to continue walking calmly through immense hostility at home, than to face down a foreign foe, with a united nation at one's back. This, as I say, is a very brave president.

After all the rage and the invective they have indulged themselves in over the last six years, the Democrats are going to face a problem when they return to power and return to the only politics they know: patronage and pensions. If President Bush that was so dreadful and the nation was in such a mess, how come it’s just back to politics as usual?

Government That Just Doesn't Care

In the last century the people of the European nations have conducted a great experiment. Upon the advice of experts they demolished the “little platoons” between the individual and government that provided support and aid when times were hard. Instead they bought into the idea that government programs could look after the poor and the unfortunate much better than private charity and mutual aid.

The driving force behind this great social experiment was an elite that assured the people that “we care.” In particular, we “care about people like you.”

There is one problem with this idea. Governments don’t care. People who work for government and who have lifetime employment tenure don’t care about you or anything else except their paycheck and the number of days till retirement.

The result of 100 years of caring is a government that just doesn’t care. Libby Purves in the London Times writes about how this works in detail.

Good Morning. Here is the news. Owing to a bank error, several thousand people have had their accounts emptied and credit barred, in some cases losing a job or university place. The bank refused to apologise, pointing out that it put the money back within three weeks — well, in 90 per cent of cases. It added that it is better to be on the safe side. In a separate incident, 2,700 blameless householders returned home to find bailiffs removing their furniture, owing to an IT error at a [finance] company that assumed the stuff belonged to them. The company expresses no regret, saying that errors must be kept “in context” because sometimes two houses look similar. It added that “customer satisfaction” with its activities is “at an all-time high”.

Imagine that! Imagine the outrage! But government does that all the time.

Here’s a horror story from Robert L. Woodson, Sr’s The Triumphs of Joseph. A woman in Philadelphia had her pregnant teenaged daughter give up her baby for adoption. Years later this woman had become commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Welfare. She found out that her grandson had just been “aged out” of the foster care system. In eighteen years the public welfare system had failed to arrange for an adoption for this child. The government just didn’t care. They allowed the child to bang around in the foster care system for eighteen years.

In the current sour political mood the American people are right to feel that, if the Republicans don’t have the competence to keep gas prices under control, what is the point of them?

But if the welfare state sponsored and defended by the Democratic Party just doesn’t care about kids, then what is the point of Democrats?

Irate Homeowners are Attacking Garbage Drivers Over Recycling

How long do you think it takes you each week to sort the garbage, toseparate the trash from the recyclables? An hour? Half an hour? Let’s say fifteen minutes.

So what is the cost to the nation, the compulsory unpaid labor, the corvée as the French called it before the Revolution, of separating out the garbage?

There’s a danger, you see. There’s a danger that the cost of separating the trash from the recyclables might be more than the savings.

That is what is going on in Britain. Tim Worstall ran the numbers, and this what he found.

By 2020 it will cost about £3.2bn a year to dispose of solid waste. Er, but that doesn’t include the 15 minutes per household in waste sepration. If you figure paying people an minimum wage, that means an additional cost of £1.6 billion.

Is anyone really suggesting that recycling can recapture the £1.6 billion cost in unpaid corvée labor by the citizenry?

There’s another cost, of course. The garbage collectors are getting attacked by irate citizens.

Binmen say recycling schemes have led to a surge in attacks by householders who find their rubbish uncollected when they fail to follow strict rules.

(Here in left-coast Seattle we are getting ready to fine people for improper recycling practices.)

Unions for refuse collectors are threatening to strike over what they say is a rising tide of violence that has seen one in five of Britain's 40,000 binmen injured in physical attacks at work and more than two thirds verbally abused.

Did you read that? One in five have suffered physical attacks at work and two thirds verbally abused.

Is recycling worth the life of a single garbage truck driver?

Education is Failing in Britain, Too

Back in the mid 1980s the experts decided, in “A Nation at Risk,” that the American school system was failing its children.

In Britain the school system is failing the children too.

Back in the 1960s the British replaced their ancient system of grammar schools with “comprehensives.” The idea was to eliminate the social evil of streaming, where intelligent students went to government grammar schools in their teens and the lesser lights went to “secondary modern” schools.

Well, thanks very much, says a graduate of the first crop that spent their teen years in comprehensives. Writes Robert Crampton in the London Times, about the kids who went to his school in Hull:

We arrived bright-eyed and keen, and we left, five or seven years later, well entertained, but not especially well educated. Yeah, we had a laugh, but we didn’t learn much. Enough to get by. Your status depended on your looks, your athleticism and your willingness to be disruptive. Academic ability was an irrelevance at best, a hindrance at worst.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

In Britain the great leaders of the nation since World War II on the left almost all went to a grammar school. Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers went to grammar schools.

But no longer. In 1965 the Labour government legislated a policy to push away the ladder on which many of their members had climbed from poverty to eminence. They replaced almost all the grammar schools with comprehensives. What was the result?

The people I was at school with have done OK. That’s what they always say about bright kids in comps, isn’t it? Oh, they’ll be OK. But we haven’t done as well as we could have done if we hadn’t been — there’s no polite way of putting this — shafted by Labour ideology for the past 40 years.

That’s about the long and the short of it. Government schools, coasting to a stop on more and more money, are shafting the children of Britain and the United States. In particular they are denying the bright children of the poor in the inner city of breaking free of the culture of helplessness and victimization.

How much longer will we allow this injustice to continue?

It's Easy for George McGovern to Praise Wal-Mart and Bash Unions

Good old liberal George McGovern can easily afford to praise Wal-Mart. He can praise if for its low prices. He san say that if you take the $27 million that Wal-Mart’s CEO took home and gave it to the hourly workers, that would only add up to $20.

The trouble is that “More” became “Too Much.” Look at parts marker Delphi. Delphi is in trouble, he writes.

One big reason is that the company's unionized workers earn $64 an hour in wages and benefits — more than twice what some of its competitors pay.

Of course, it’s easy for him to talk. He’s a Democrat-emeritus. He’s not running for anything. But still. Somebody has to say this sort of thing, and it might as well be George McGovern, the founder of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. But here’s the money graf.

Universal healthcare provided by the federal government is one way to supplement income. It is also a way of relieving hard-pressed businesses of one of their highest cost burdens.

You can see where this is going. Bail out the auto companies with national health insurance. But let us get back to the high ground.

“Liberals,” he writes, “must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality.”

We can all agree on that. And how about starting with the unjust and inegalitarian fact that liberal Democrat union members working for state and local governments earn about 40-50 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector?

Where’s the justice in that?