Why the welfare state is self-perpetuating

Unlike conservatives I don't advocate government spending money on a plethora of "family strengthening" programmes. Neither do I think families should get taxbreaks over and above what single people qualify for.

On holiday I re-read Is there really a fatherhood crisis?

Stephen Baskerville, professor of political science at Howard University, puts it better than I can.

"Identifying fathers rather than governments as the culprits behind family dissolution not only justifies harsh law enforcement measures, but also rationalises policies that contribute further to the absence of fathers, which they are ostensibly meant to prevent. Further - given the undeniable coorelation that the fatherhood advocates have established between fatherlessness and today's larger social pathologies, such as poverty, crime, substance abuse - it allows officials to ignore the simplest and safest solution to these ills, which is to stop eliminating fathers. Instead, governments devise elaborate schemes, invariably extending their reach and power, to deal with the problems that their removal of fathers has created: not only fatherhood promotion and marriage therapy, but larger anti-poverty programmes beloved of the left and law enforcement measures dear to the right. By concocting a fatherhood crisis where none previously existed, government across the spectrum has neutered the principal rival to its power and created an unlimited supply of problems to solve."

The paper also introduced me to a new term, "plethysmograph." It is not in my dictionary and I am not going to describe here what it means. Read the paper. I am sure you will be as horrified as I am at what is going on in the States, according to the author.