Wait, where did you go, audience? Oh, right, I don’t know if I have one. C’est la vie. I’m very much an inner directed personality.
When the pretty girl marries the surgeon, that is eugenics. They have cute, smart kids, who go on to successful careers and marry similar people. For political correctness, let me add “when the pretty boy marries the surgeon, who may or may not be male, female, other, and who may be of any ethnicity, nationality, or religious creed (except Christian). Conscience clear now. Let’s proceed.
Two posts ago I talked about raising the average IQ of persons of African descent in this country. This would necessarily involve, immediately, ensuring to the extent possible adequate nutrition and intellectual stimulation in the formative years. Research on how to optimize this process would be useful. It would include vitamin intake and, presumably, not living in a war zone, which would involve more effective policing, which would mean, in the short term, more blacks in prison.
Now, for the life of me, I don’t know how ANY kid can grow up in the ghetto psychologically normal, much less optimized to participate in a society based on advanced social skills, including personal restraint, interpersonal trust, and the capacity to digest and use various forms of knowledge quickly and seamlessly.
Conservatives often tend to take this “lift yourself by your bootstrap” approach. Sometimes this works. Most of the time, if remediation of social ills is the task, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work in aggreggate, since most people are average. Only above average people lift themselves by their bootstraps. Depending on everyone being above average is planning on failure, by definition.
Conservative will further ask the question: why care at all? Why not let them rise or fall according to their merits? To my way of thinking, helping the less fortunate is the right thing to do. I think that compassion has often been used rhetorically by Leftists to gain power which they didn’t use to help ANYONE but them and theirs, but that fact does not negate the desirability of caring about our fellow men and women. This is a moral argument. I will not judge those who do not agree. All that is NECESSARY in this society, in my view, is that those who judge others do what they can to bear their own burdens. Most conservatives I know meet that criteria.
Be that as it may, the topic awaits. What if women who got pregnant outside of wedlock were given the option of, say, giving the child up for adoption, and getting child welfare payments anyway for life, if they would just get their tubes tied. No more kids. Sexual freedom. And if they elected not to get their tubes tied, then they get nothing for any future kids, and extra visits from Child Protective Services to make sure they are taking care of them.
What if men who got a woman knocked up and didn’t want to hang around could avoid child support payments, if they got a vasectomy?
In both cases, we would in effect be paying people not to have kids, just like we pay (or used to pay; I need to check if this is still going on) farmers not to grow corn. The kids wind up on the dole one way or another anyway, and it is precisely the non-producers–the ones who are not working 3 crappy jobs to make ends meet–who do most of the reproducing. Over time, this would have a salutary effect, and it would be fully voluntary. In the long run, I suspect it would save us a lot of money too.
Conversely, what if we paid parents in some low income neighborhoods extra money in child welfare checks if they got and stayed married?
This may already happen, but what if unwed mothers got more money the more education they received?
However we do it, in the long run much of social and personal structure is based on very simple pain/reward, carrot/stick calculus, and given this, our policies must explicitly reward desirable behaviors, and discourage undesirable, self-destructive behaviors.
Some of my conservative friends would be horrified (hell, may BE horrified, if any are reading this) how much place I am giving for the provision of social services.
The simple reality is that I am quite aware of all the suffering in the world, and I see no reason for unnecessary suffering. The problem we have faced for 50 or more years is that the self appointed guardians of the poor are power drunk fools who have made everything worse for everyone. They have not solved the problem, and they have run up massive bar tabs (Mr. Speaker, I’d like another shot of Self Importance when you get around to it) doing it.
Random thoughts. I need to chill before I go to bed. My damn brain runs 24/7.