Just Dont Say The M Word - Road to the Middle Class

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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