- Raising children is hard work
Agreed. So is learning to play the oboe. It’s also probably personally rewarding for those that decide to do it, otherwise no one would do it.
- Children have social utility as well as personal utility.
You benefit from having kids. I do not. If you happen to raise them well, and they become productive tax-paying adults, then they will benefit society, and get their rewards in terms of income and shiny trophies and what-all. If you didn’t have them, someone else would. That’s obvious.
- If a group receives utility from a person they accept an obligation to pay for that utility
I have no problem funding things like schools, because I want the kids to be educated. I’ll pay for welfare, so poor kids can eat. I will not pay for you to have children, solely because they’re children. Show me a need, not a want.
- Parents accept (in theory) a great deal of demands from society in the manner in which they raise their children.
I’m assuming if ‘society’ said it was OK to raise little hell-beasts, you’d place no behavioral constraints upon them? The idea of being responsible for your choices, not to mention that of a job well done has lost it’s charm, and the only thing that keeps parents from letting their children be raised as homicidal maniacs, I suppose, is society.
- When a group makes demands of an individual, they are again obliged to pay for that right.
I certainly have not demanded that you raise children. I do demand that if you decide to become a parent, you should do it well. If you choose parenthood, part of your obligation is to do a good job. If you choose to drive a car, in the USA you need to drive on the right side of the road. It is rather silly for you to threaten to drive on the wrong side of the road unless you’re paid not to.
Perhaps some would not. Those that would would have a more difficult time raising their children, and their children would be that worse as members of society in adulthood.
Again, you’re holding us hostage- give me money, or I’ll raise my children badly! I should hope that if you can’t raise your children properly on your own, that you’d think twice about taking on the task to begin with.
But what do you (the generic you) care? You’ve got yours, the next generation can live in igorance and poverty for all you care.
Paying for education and aid to the poor is not an issue here; it’s wealthy people who want hand-outs, while cutting welfare programs. Part of the argument in ‘Baby Boon’ is that it’s not about helping the children, it’s about helping the parents of the right kind of children.
Parenthood is damn hard work. The benefits one receives from society, even from one’s children is minimal compared to the work. Parents do what they do because of a connection and the duty of fulfillment of obligations to humanity and their own culture as a whole.
This is the biggest load of BS I think I’ve ever heard. Parents, generally, wax eloquent about the joys of raising children. I’ve heard that they love the idea of being able to pass on their wisdom, of having someone carry on the family name/genes, having someone to love, to take care of them when they’re older, and many others. I have never heard of any parent who said ‘I’m having children to fulfill my duty to humanity.’
But I’m the big sap, I guess. All of humanity existed to make our own generation. We might as well just rape the world, forget about having children, and let the human race die out. Small loss, given some of the examples I’ve seen.
It’s interesting that you string these concepts together the way you do. We are raping the world- to support our over-sized population. Meaning, children. An American child uses as many resources as several third-world children (I’ve read figures ranging from three to 600, depending on the country and the source). All that food and plastic and gasoline and so forth needed to support that population is crowding out a lot of other life that isn’t human. We’d actually be doing the world as a whole a big favor of we did die out. So, perhaps in a sense, people that don’t have kids are doing so out of a ‘connection and the duty of fulfillment of obligations to the planet and their own biosphere as a whole.’ You’re welcome.
Society sets standards (and rightly so) which I must fulfill as a parent. I don’t resent such standards.
I just object to people who think that doctors and engineers and janitors and and customer service reps and phone technicians, and construction workers just spring out of nowhere to keep the world running for the next generation. You think that civilization will just be around to support you in your old age, without taking any steps to preserve it.
Wrong. When a plumber comes and fixes my leaky faucet, I’ll write him a big ol’ check for his trouble. If a little kid decides to be a plumber, presumably he can assume that he’ll be rewarded. People have been making more people without help from the rest of us for long enough (and are still doing it in other countries); we don’t need to take any steps to make sure reproduction keeps happening. In fact, as noted above, it’s happening at a rate that is going to hurt us all in the long run if we don’t take steps to slow it down some. What those steps should be is a different topic, but refusing to reward people just because they reproduce is probably a logical first step.
And note that regardless of your financial planning for your old age, you have to have civilization itself around to give that money meaning. You can’t eat paper money or bank accounts. Unless you’re stocking up 15-25 years of actual food for your retirement, you are assuming that my children will be around to give that money meaning.
Wrong again. I’m assuming adults will be here. And it’s a pretty good bet that civilization will exist when I’m old. A bigger threat to civilization is that we exceed our capacity to support the population and have famines, plagues, and wretched living conditions. Or more than we have now, at any rate. Sure, call me alarmist. But I’ll lay odds that my scenario is a hell of a lot more likely than the one you seem to be putting forth- if we don’t subsidize reproduction, humanity will die out.