Comment by Fascist Nation

Entered on: 6/21/2008 6:44:58 AM

Ernie has extracted the most important paragraph of the story. I hate to say it, but the government supplied free assistance removes the heavy investment (burden) child rearing entails. Indeed, government makes it easier for a female to raise a baby absent a second member (typically the male). In doing so, and frankly, by removing the stigma of out of wedlock birth the government has encouraged breeding machines to produce more dependents for government programs.

[The stigma was there to create a price for pregnancy to discourage one's daughter from taking a young life with the whole world of possibilities ahead and vastly narrowing them to rearing a child alone. The other side of the coin was government dramatically raising the age of childhood from around 12 - 14 to the artificially clear cut 18 years old. This was done during the depression to eliminate a group of people from gainful employment competing with the disgruntled voters. But it also means children become mental adults much later after the bodies have physically become adults. Of course public school curriculum was equally delayed and spread out to accommodate the new babysitting of prior adults so that today's high school graduates cannot pass tests given the comparable "8th grader" of a hundred years ago.