I've been working as a volunteer for decades with the grassroots nonprofit org Family and Home Network. We call on policymakers to adopt principles of inclusion: make family policies w/o regard for parents' choices about caregiving and income-earning.
To all the progressives: policies that abide by basic principles of equality and choice, are also anti-racist.
Need to hear more from mothers and other primary caregivers? I meet regularly with people from diverse communities, including people who have experienced poverty, living on benefits, doing unpaid caregiving for years. We are out here, working w/o pay to advocate for unpaid caregivers.
The pandemic highlighted the essential role of caregiving. Some advocates are seeking discriminatory policies - designed for parents using care services and failing to support parents doing the care themselves. We must not support caregiving only when it is delegated to paid caregivers.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on what I gather are the deeper philosophical differences between you and Cass here.
I'm wondering if you think there's a similar rift at play in how folks on the Right are hysterical about "equity" these days: just as "equity" really seems to be about deliberately engineering equality of opportunity (rather than equality of outcome), the child allowance is about correcting for unfair inequalities given the contingencies of supercapitalism/neoliberalism. What I gather is Cass's conservative populism seems weighed down by the racist/classist baggage of makers/takers, the moralizing of poverty, gaslighting of the poor, etc., of Reaganism.
But there also seems to be a libertarian element, too. I remember Jonah Goldberg remarking in Liberal Fascism (a superb but spectacularly misguided book) that libertarianism would be a great political philosophy if it weren't for foreign policy and children. The problem with classical liberalism, from this perspective, is that it imagines this field of atomic adults rationally calculating, maximizing utility, voluntarily exchanging stuff--which is sort of the noble lie of the whole thing.
Your support of the Romney plan (or critique of the Cass critique) seems to advance a cool idea: that having children ought to be regarded as, at some level, economic activity--albeit with an expanded notion of economics! Which makes a kind of sense, given the word means "household."
Remember how for decades people in positions of power convinced a good chunk of the public that most poor people, for cultural reasons, wouldn't achieve very much? They were right, but they picked the wrong culture.
All good commentary, but it misses the central criticism of this bill, namely that it would create, or more accurately, exacerbate pockets of ghettos throughout the country, thus forcing many low income families to live in high crime, gang, and drug dependent communities. See Mickey Kaus post on this: https://kaus.substack.com/p/joes-dole
I love this article so much. Thank you.
I've been working as a volunteer for decades with the grassroots nonprofit org Family and Home Network. We call on policymakers to adopt principles of inclusion: make family policies w/o regard for parents' choices about caregiving and income-earning.
To all the progressives: policies that abide by basic principles of equality and choice, are also anti-racist.
Need to hear more from mothers and other primary caregivers? I meet regularly with people from diverse communities, including people who have experienced poverty, living on benefits, doing unpaid caregiving for years. We are out here, working w/o pay to advocate for unpaid caregivers.
The pandemic highlighted the essential role of caregiving. Some advocates are seeking discriminatory policies - designed for parents using care services and failing to support parents doing the care themselves. We must not support caregiving only when it is delegated to paid caregivers.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on what I gather are the deeper philosophical differences between you and Cass here.
I'm wondering if you think there's a similar rift at play in how folks on the Right are hysterical about "equity" these days: just as "equity" really seems to be about deliberately engineering equality of opportunity (rather than equality of outcome), the child allowance is about correcting for unfair inequalities given the contingencies of supercapitalism/neoliberalism. What I gather is Cass's conservative populism seems weighed down by the racist/classist baggage of makers/takers, the moralizing of poverty, gaslighting of the poor, etc., of Reaganism.
But there also seems to be a libertarian element, too. I remember Jonah Goldberg remarking in Liberal Fascism (a superb but spectacularly misguided book) that libertarianism would be a great political philosophy if it weren't for foreign policy and children. The problem with classical liberalism, from this perspective, is that it imagines this field of atomic adults rationally calculating, maximizing utility, voluntarily exchanging stuff--which is sort of the noble lie of the whole thing.
Your support of the Romney plan (or critique of the Cass critique) seems to advance a cool idea: that having children ought to be regarded as, at some level, economic activity--albeit with an expanded notion of economics! Which makes a kind of sense, given the word means "household."
Remember how for decades people in positions of power convinced a good chunk of the public that most poor people, for cultural reasons, wouldn't achieve very much? They were right, but they picked the wrong culture.
All good commentary, but it misses the central criticism of this bill, namely that it would create, or more accurately, exacerbate pockets of ghettos throughout the country, thus forcing many low income families to live in high crime, gang, and drug dependent communities. See Mickey Kaus post on this: https://kaus.substack.com/p/joes-dole
Hey whaddaya know, Robert Orr is my cousin, small world...