(i personally would prefer that the woman would stay at home).
Why is that?
Do you think it's for cultural reasons, biological, or a bit of both?
IME it is the spin our culture has placed on biological factors. It is undisputable that it is women who give birth to children and where possible, nurse them in their first year or so. At most this would justify a mother remaining primarily at home for several months to a year with a new baby. Extrapolating that into permanent household servitude is uncalled for. It makes just as much sense for the woman to return to the workforce or other public activity after that first year and have the man take over, when the child is weaned or close to it. Birth control and smaller families in the modern age make this scenario even more practical and sensible.
Plus, think of it: if parents of both sexes routinely took time off for young children, it would no longer be an excuse for not hiring or promoting women. Since any employee with a new child might be gone for a few months, workplaces and business models would have to adjust, making it easier for everyone to balance work and family life.
Any opinions on women in the millitary?
Women should participate on the same terms as men. Meaning: in a draft, women must serve, too. Whether draft or volunteer, people are assigned to duties based on ability and, when possible, interests. This may result in certain specializations being predominantly male, while others may be significantly female. As long as it is based on actual ability, if that is how it all falls out, fine.
No I think today's feminism is unnecessary in the west. Women already have equality, and in many cases are unfairly advantaged.
At the end of the day it's just down to people building unfounded sophistry on the back of their own egotistical desire to get advantages they don't deserve by playing the victim card.
Gender equality under the law having already been achieved by default any attempts to lobby / pressure for 'more equality' is in fact an attempt to get women extra perks.
However it's needed - if that's your thing - in some third world countries etc. Where women are actually kept from doing what men can based on ridiculous reasons - like driving and such.
Women in third world countries certainly do have it much worse, and much work is needed to correct those situations. It is wrong, however, to say that women in the US or other western nations have equality, meaning equality of opportunity. Strictly speaking, in the continuing absence of an equal rights amendment to the constitution, gaps remain in equality under the law, for example requiring only men to register for selective service. These gaps are much fewer and smaller than they used to be, and the obstacles to equality of opportunity are thus much more cultural and social than legal.
Save on greater costs later?
'Modest' amount of public spending trend since 1970:
Estimated present debt per capita and projected debt per capita in the future.
None of that shows the cost of birth control relative to what society pays for unplanned/unwanted children.
Not to sound cynical but true authority rests with those with guns and the ability to command them.
"The ability to command them" comes through police chiefs, who are generally appointed by mayors or city councils, who are elected by the voters. So, if people don't feel the police are using their citizen-given authority wisely, they need only "vote the bums out" who are in charge of them.
Just the above data I've provided seriously challenges the narrative that because of public schooling the American economy and innovation has gotten better.
What have we seriously invented that can be traced back to the public schools? Famous inventors in our history like Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates were pretty much drop outs.
Public education is not actually a hallmark of our democracy since our democracy existed before public schooling. Public education as we recognize it today was thrust upon the modern world by Otto von Bismark in Imperialist Prussian Germany in the 19th century. What we recognize as the base model of public schooling today was started there in a rather undemocratic society.
Your data go back only to 1960. Fortunately the history of American innovation reaches back much farther than that. So does public education. It certainly predates the American Revolution, and went along with the mindset that our new nation would not have an aristocracy, but rather anyone willing to work hard could get ahead. And no, I'm not going to go and pick out specific examples of public school students who went on to do great things, if only because: (1) they are too numerous to count, and (2) one doesn't have to become a famous inventor to benefit from a good public education and become a productive and contributing member of society. If schools are not doing their job, and many of them indeed are not, we fix or replace them, not abandon the idea of public schools. (I suppose when you hear of scandals and gross mismangement in the DoD, you want to abolish that, too?)
I'm all for handing out BC if the issue of welfare and its strong link to single parenthood is also addressed. Again, where is the incentive to not have children anyways if it means a bigger check for the welfare recipient? I'm speaking purely from an economic incentive standpoint. If a person's real income is around 30k/year, but welfare provides them with closer to 55k/year then their choices will be effected especially if more children could mean another source of revenue. Typically children are a net consumer of resources as they cannot produce anything yet. This net cost typically limits people's economic choices even in terms of birthing children. However, when a child is a net benefit (i.e. state checks) then that completely flips it around on its head. In reality what you'd probably get more responsible women consuming the BC benefit, women that would've have been more cautious or less risky about having sex anyways, and not much of a change in the main population of single moms that tend to be on or below the poverty line.
The extra "revenue" earned by having an extra child is more than eaten up in caring for that child. As we both mentioned, children are expensive, and this doesn't even count the emotional and personal toll of raising a child. Children are not a net benefit due to handouts. In fact, in many poor families, children must work as soon as possible to bring in income, whether at a "real" job when they reach legal working age, or doing informal work like child care, mowing lawns, or similar. Inner city high schools are full of students behind on their schoolwork and drifting off in class because they spend so much after school time working and caring for younger siblings. Assuming their school actually is doing its job, this makes it near impossible for them to benefit. Hence the cycle of dependence repeats.
Bottom line: make it easy for people to avoid having children they cannot support, and make it easy for the children they do have to better themselves through education. Both are a good investment. (By the way, I don't see too many businesses stepping up to improve the education that fails to prepare too many young people for work.)
Condoms are much cheaper and so is abstinence unless the couple is prepared to deal with a potential pregnancy. I fail to see how it's society's job to provide them with contraception options especially since options already exist. And no, it's not worth letting many single moms on welfare slip through the cracks especially since their choices tend to put a huge cost on society as a whole, far more than socialized birth control ever would. Again, I think intelligent women are going to take up the BC while less intelligent women will not. I fear an unintended dysgenic consequence and cycle since children tend to emulate their parents for the most part.
You keep missing the point. You are arguing ideology; I am arguing practical economics.
Yes they can but the man can be lied to. It's far harder to lie about using a condom since it's far more visible.
Nothing stops a man from using a condom, regardless of what his partner is or isn't using for BC. If a woman won't accept that, time for him to walk.
The fact that welfare has increased exponentially since the war on poverty began decades ago doesn't mean I'm overestimating the appeal. People do it because it's in their best economic interest to do so regardless if their poor circumstance could actually be mitigated with better choices versus the few people that have extremely limited choices. Yes, we're both talking about a cycle here. It sounds like you're saying socialize the BC and that's it. As if making BC more available with magically decline the numbers of single moms weighing down the system. I'm arguing that different category of people would be more likely to take advantage of the BC and not the same welfare recipients. I'm saying I'm on board with making BC available, even with tax money only as long as welfare is majorly reformed and looked at with more scrutiny and common sense. Why should we as a society be made to pay for another program when one we're already paying for doesn't work too well?.[/QUOTE]
Welfare programs could stand improvement, regardless of what happens to BC. And BC doesn't need to be "socialized", it needs to be available at low to no cost. That is an economic provision. What needs to be "socialized" to use your term, is the people the free BC is targeted toward.
I wasn't planning to get into this aspect of social programs, but it is an obvious extension here, so I will. You claim the least educated and aware poor people will not bother to use BC even if free. Other discussion (not just this one) has mentioned various ways in which people try to game the welfare system. These and other problems with existing systems happen because those running the programs don't know what is really going on in the lives of the beneficiaries. This makes it hard to tell whether someone is lying, or what their real circumstances are. The only way to solve this is to increase staffing in these programs such that someone has the time to engage with people receiving benefits, to get to know them and their families. They can then provide a much better assessment of real needs vs. deception. They can also then work with parents to get them used to the idea of BC (long-term approaches like IUDs or norplant are especially effective due to low maintenance), and address the real impediments to their supporting their families through work. There is simply no substitute for direct and sustained personal involvement in the lives of people who, for whatever reason, are not making it on their own.
