The Relevance of Conservatism 4 - Welfare

Earlier articles in this series explained that conservatives believe we ought not to try social ideas that are known not to work.  Progressive politicians' ideas always sound wonderful, but they've all been tried before.  Each generation of liberals claims that they're smarter than previous generations and their wonderful ideas will work this time, but we know better.  That's why we oppose most liberal programs.

The Evils of Welfare

Forbes magazine recently published an article telling conservatives what to do about the gender gap, pointing out that far more women had voted for Mr. Obama than for Mr. Romney.  Forbes suggested that conservatives point out that economic growth benefits women more than increased government handouts benefit them and suggest that women should vote for candidates who understand how to generate growth.

It's true that economic growth benefits women more than government spending does, but Forbes' advice ignores many generations of natural selection.  It's always been easy for women to become pregnant, but women have never been able to raise children to maturity without help.

A nursing mother can gather carbohydrates from plants, but she can't hunt because a crying baby will scare the animals she's trying to catch.  The protein she needs for successful pregnancy comes from men who hunt.

A farm wife has a full-time job preparing the food that comes into the house.  There was baking day, wash day, and other days full of endless toil.  A woman simply couldn't survive without a man providing the raw materials that went into feeding her and her offspring.

A woman's reproductive success depended on persuading someone to take care of her and her children.  Natural selection favored women who were best able to focus on finding someone who'd provide care.

Depending on Men

Society traditionally assigned the role of feeding women to husbands, but that made women dependent on men, and modern women have decided they don't like that.  As women became involved in politics, they favored government programs that covered more and more of their costs raising children.

What did Mr. Obama promise?  Free contraception, free abortions, affordable, high quality day care, paid maternity leave, and other ways for society overall to pay the costs of a woman's reproductive choices instead of depending on one individual husband per each reproducing woman.

Having society pay her costs means a woman doesn't have to find a husband to get an apartment and child care; she only has to get pregnant because the welfare system picks up her costs.

This doesn't work as well as liberals claim because a welfare check is no substitute for a father.  We're now raising our 3rd and 4th generation of fatherless kids.  Conservatives don't need sociological studies to know how that turns out; we can find out by reading newspapers.

The problem is that although mothers can do a decent job of early child care, it takes a father to force a teen-age son to behave properly and grow up into a civilized citizen as opposed to a barbarian.

In all human societies, the father is regarded by tradition as indispensable ... no child should be brought into the world without a man - and one man at that - assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.  [emphasis added]

Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski quoted in Daniel Patrick Moynihan Family and Nation, (San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace, 1986) pp. 169-170.

Without fathers to tie them to society, young men are prone to get in trouble.  More than half the young men in welfare ghettos are in prison, on parole, or in other trouble with law enforcement, and the overwhelming majority of these have no fathers in their lives or, often, any adult males at all.

In cities such as Detroit and Baltimore where the welfare culture has come to full flower, crime drives citizens elsewhere.  Population in these cities is shrinking so fast that vacant lots are being converted to farming.

The War on Blacks

The phenomenon of family disintegration has been particularly visible in the black community.  In his article "Liberalism Versus Blacks," the great black economist and writer Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote:

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.  Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.

Although the welfare system destroyed black families first, the New York Times reports that most of the babies being born to white mothers under 30 are being born out of wedlock.  A child born into a single-parent home has an 80% greater chance of growing up in poverty than a child with two parents.  By encouraging fatherless births, the welfare system multiplies child proverty.

The women who voted for our welfare system have created a situation of multi-generation child poverty.  Women want to be taken care of, however, so it's unlikely that they'll change their voting patterns just because these programs don't work.  Liberals who gain votes from welfare recipients or from women who want more government goodies certainly won't change their programs - they work just fine keeping them in power, which is all they care about even as society collapses around them.

Conservatives, though, care about the generations yet to come as well as generations past, and we don't like to see the rising tide of barbarism.  When it comes right down to it, most people would rather live in a well-ordered civilized world than the "mean streets" or anarchy of a fallen empire.

In fact, as America's census has shown for years, individual people and families tend to leave the states that most exemplify blue-state liberalism such as California and New York and move to safe, orderly, economically successful, conservatively-governed red states like Texas.  Unfortunately, as soon as they arrive, they start voting for the same liberal policies that drove their old home to ruin.