Friday, February 22, 2019

A Guy With Two Cats Comes Out in Favor of Government Supported Childcare

Krugman with a cat.
By Robert Wenzel

Paul Krugman is out with a technocratic justification for Elizabeth Warren's childcare plan.

The plan proposed by Warren would ensure that every American would be able to enroll children up to 5 years old in a childcare program while paying no more than 7 percent of their income in fees. 

Families below a certain income level — $50,000 a year in today’s dollars, for a family of four — could use the facilities free of charge, while everyone above that income threshold would pay a fee of between 0 percent and 7 percent of their income.

Of course, since this is about government picking up the tab, it would be about government approved childcare programs. "Child care would be regulated to ensure that basic quality was maintained and subsidized to make it affordable," says Krugman. Enter the evil bastard statists.

The idea that government should get anywhere near the mind of a pre-schooler is absolutely horrific.

The British award-winning author, Mark O'Neill, reminds us who the big proponents of early government childcare were, though not even these despicable regimes started as early as Krugman and Warren desire with government approved education:
Communism and Nazism were poles apart in an ideological sense. After the First World War, Germany and Russia never saw eye to eye. Being so different was one of the reasons why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939 was just a temporary marriage of convenience. Hitler saw Communism as Nazi Germany’s natural and ever-lasting enemy of which they (Germany) could never come to terms with.

But if you were to examine the social structures of Nazi Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), you would notice startling similarities. If the theories behind Communism and Nazism were different, the methods to implement those ideological ideas were all but identical. One of the ways in which Communism and Nazism were similar were the ways in which the two regimes regarded their young people.
In Germany, there was the Hitler Jugend and the Bund Deutscher Madel. In the Soviet Union, it was the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol. Different names but identical aims. The main aim of the Soviet groups, as with the Nazi version, was to get young Russian people to swear blind obedience to the Soviet Communist Party and the State. They would be brainwashed and lectured on doses of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, and they would be taught that their sole vocation in life was to serve the state unquestioningly and willingly...
In the first rung of the youth group ladder was the Young Pioneers at the age of 10. Membership of the youth movements were officially optional but, in reality, it was compulsory if the child wanted to get ahead in life and make something of themselves.


This is how Krugman, in the pages of The New York Times,  justifies the preschool nonsense:
[C]aring for children doesn’t just help them grow up to be productive adults. It also has immediate economic benefits, making it easier for parents to stay in the work force.

Over the past 20 years, women’s prime-age employment in the U.S. has lagged ever further behind the rest of the advanced world — at this point we’re well below even Japan. And lack of child care is probably one main reason...

So child care really should be an important part of the progressive agenda.
How bad of an economist do you have to be to make this type of economically ignorant argument? Perhaps it is the case that we are such a rich country that many women prefer staying at home to bring up their young children. Or perhaps basic cost-benefit analysis says that bringing up one's own children is the most cost-efficient thing to do rather than boost the measured GDP of a country where every home as cable TV, laptops, microwaves and running water.

What exactly is a mother supposed to produce that boosts measured GDP so much that it is better than staying home with her young children?

And, it should be made clear, that this promotion of government-funded pre-school is coming from Krugman, who has no children of his own. I believe two of his cats have passed away (my condolences) but a replacement cat or cats have been brought in.

Perhaps it would be better if Krugman stays away from promoting statist toddler education programs and spend the time as a stay-at-home cat parent teaching his replacement cat(s) to chase balls of yarn.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.






5 comments:

  1. RW --

    One minor suggestion: Whenever possible, use "National Socialism" instead of "Nazi". "Nazi" is a shorthand version that, through the years, has taken on meanings that did not originally accrue to the term.

    There is a Movement on the Left that is currently attempting to show that Stalin was a Capitalist. "We all know that Nazism was Capitalist. Stalin was a Capitalist and we therefore may claim that Socialism hasn't been attempted but has been instead co-opted by the Capitalists..."

    The premises are false but it doesn't matter. National Socialism at least places the Language in its proper place. "The National Socialist German Workers Party" was the Party's name and it should featured at every opportunity. Any contraction of the Socialist Phrases to something such as "Nazism" allows an argument to proceed that gives away much of the argument before it even starts.

    As for Stalin being a Capitalist...
    CW

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  2. If you have children, it is YOUR responsibility to take care of them, not mine. There is a word for people who try to shirk financial and parental responsibility for their children: "deadbeats". In addition to the above language of making sure everyone knows that Hitler was a socialist, let's make sure the people who try to get others to pay for their children are deadbeats. If you can't pay for kids, use birth control, you deadbeats!

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  3. Krugman is just looking after his own interests; his economics these days are pitched at pre-K five-year-olds, so he's looking to expand his student body. Next he'll be crusading to give them the right to vote.

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  4. Krugman is an intellectual that makes his living finding reasons for the masses to obey the ruling class. His area of doing so is centered around economics. He makes a very nice living doing this.

    The only reason the Nazis waited to a later age to indoctrinate children was because they were in power in the 1930s and 40s. The science of using people as livestock has advanced since then and it is now known that age is too late and thus can only achieve limited results. Taking care of younger children requires more effort so when it was thought the results could be achieved at older ages that's what they did.

    "It also has immediate economic benefits, making it easier for parents to stay in the work force."

    And there it is. The masses are livestock owned by the corporate-state and the idea is to maximize the productivity of the herd.

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  5. Marx called for the abolishment of the family in his communist manifesto. What better time to start than pre-school?

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