Labor

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s Labor Day, or as we call it around the house (okay, okay, as I call it around the house) “That frigging Commie Holiday.” I don’t think my kids (or Dan whose birthday it often is) ever fully understood my hatred of the holiday, which is — in the rest of world — celebrated on May 1st.

Hurray on the US for having it on a different day, which in Soviet days obviated the (paid) agitators and their shenanigans. (There were always shenanigans for May Day.) But it is still a commie holiday, and the unspoken part of Labor was always “organized labor” which has been a creature of international communism for my entire (feel very long) life.

Not that there is anything despicable about labor, labors and laboring for a living. Nor is there anything particularly heroic, either. Labor is simply the way humans make a living. No, seriously. Any human, even solitary marauders has to make to make a living, and killing and robbing is labor, if that’s what you do for a living. I imagine Bad Guy #2 groans at the prospect of mugging yet another passerby, but when he’s out of money to buy his next meal, he most surely must. As must we all, at our less nefarious pursuits, me pouring out vivid hallucinations into electrons so people might experience them and pay me, and you at your various occupations.

Even animals, and insects and worms, when described in biology books, have a section about how this creature “makes a living”. How it labors, so to put it.

And on this fresh and bright commie holiday Labor Day I have various probably disjointed thoughts. Bear with me. And forgive me for being so late with this. We slept till eleven and then someone who shall remain Dan told me I wasn’t having cheerios for breakfast, not after the last week, and dragged me out for a breakfast of eggs and bacon. Which took place in a very busy diner, which explains how late I am. Sorry. I’ll be posting this next week, but hours will be erratic.

First, we finally found the amount of labor necessary for me to actually lose weight. Not a great deal of weight but the scales dial bends towards mercy down slowly. Apparently, despite my senescent years, I’m supposed to do heavy labor and weight lifting 18 hours a day, till I can’t sit down without falling asleep.

I’ve long suspected this, since the side of the family I take after tends to fatten to the size of planetoids on a diet of fish and vegetables, because we are built as though we were supposed to labor from can till can’t in heavy physical work conditions, and most of us have the overgrown brain that disposes us to thinking work. Back as we go, there are lawyers, engineers, doctors. The engineers are a little more trim because they tend to be hands on and super-involved on the factory floor. My own profession (I’m the black (ink stained) sheep of the family) is no more heavy-labor oriented, though heaven knows I tend to find heavy labor on my own, from carpentry to farming. Until a novel high jacks me again.

Which is as may be, but I’m very tired of being tired. We do have (at least) one more week of this. Maybe 2. I’ll try to make it one, because Orphans is loud.

The other thoughts are more complex.

I saw Trump float the thing about paying people to stay home and raise kids. And I’m sure it seems like a good idea to him. It is a way — I’m sure he thinks — to make people able to have kids or more kids. And he’s not totally wrong. A lot of the zers and zellenials who are now in prime child bearing age are slammed under student debts, in a market that is profoundly hostile to young people, and saddled with an education to which we should always append “mal” that hampers their ability to function in the real world. All three of them make it hard for them to engage in the most important labor of any generation: bringing about the next generation. So paying them/giving them money to have more kids and stay home must seem like a good idea.

Why do I think it’s not? Well, first because I am astringently and stridently against money from government. Government doesn’t MAKE money, you see. It can only re-distribute the product of theft. As a moral person I oppose theft and parting in the product of theft (even if this particular law of course wouldn’t affect me.)

But beyond that? Because it won’t do what’s intended. I saw Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries do this dance as far back as the eighties, giving people more and more “benes” from the government if they JUST would for the love of heaven have some kids.

It didn’t work.

When a culture decides reproducing isn’t a thing anymore, the problem is never money. Oh, it is money as well, and there’s a much more logical solution to the money problem, but it is never ONLY money. Or lack of maternal/paternal leave or any of the things government can do.

When a culture stops reproducing it’s sick in the mind and soul.

In this case it is the crazy propaganda work by feminists, for decades now, both casting men as the villain and women as the victims in everything AND making women feel as if “settling” for being a wife and mother is a failure. This is what is driving the neuroticism of trying to be a perfect trad wife. (Look, chilluns, for most of my life I did my own sewing, baked my own bread. I also cleaned, cooked, rebuilt two Victorians, painted walls, installed cabinets, and just about everything else, while raising two oversized/over brained goons and writing at least 2 novels and 50 short stories a year. And I won’t say I didn’t make myself crazy about it. I was born neurotic. But I was certainly no obsessing over being perfect.) That men are now answering the propaganda with their own and echoing Islamic nonsense (in fact most of it originates in foreign shit posters) about keeping women in the house and with no right to anything doesn’t make things better.

Again, I reiterate that the answer is equality under the law. Men and women aren’t the same. They’ll never be equal. In fact, I incline to Heinlein’s insight that we’re not so much the same species as symbiots. We’re that different. But we can be equal under the law. What that means after the raving insanity of the 20th century is to stop the paternalistic protection of women that is either written into law or executed as though it were law.

No, don’t believe all women. They can — and do — lie as much as men. No, don’t treat female murderers as if they were merely damaged, sweet children who just need to be coddled a little further. Don’t give women the advantage in child custody and divorce. Don’t hire women preferentially. Don’t promote women preferentially. Stop distorting schooling to cater to female ways of learning. And conversely, do allow women to have sports leagues of their own, because the biological difference is that great. And for the love of Bob let men (and women) have single sex schooling and clubs and associations. Don’t assume men are getting some benefit simply because they can have some time without a female looking over their shoulder. And let women have their own associations and structures. They scare the living daylights out of me because I don’t get female power-pecking, but you know what? Sewing circles might be needed in our next war. Even if they’re actually book clubs or charitable organizations.

Also stop telling women that they must excel in the more socially acceptable male pursuits (No woman fights for her right to be trash collector) and stop telling them that wanting to have children or raise their own children is a failure. Biological imperatives are biological imperatives. Thwarting them gives us the current insanity.

I’d be far less worried about the spectacle of support for the Clancy harpy if there weren’t a huge potential for copy-cats, due to other women who feel they failed because they’re mothers and wives and therefore everyone else must pay for their unhappiness.

As a woman who raised small kids, listen to me, it is very important that women understand that they’re not valueless or failures because they’re mothers. It’s very important to change that part of the culture.

No, I don’t think that child murder is either justified or justifiable. They should not have given the Clancy woman a three year respite or investigation or trial. Look, I know they had to give it due to laws. But to satisfy my inner sense of justice, they should have taken her out back and given her the same treatment she gave her innocent children, then buried her at a cross roads and erased her from every record, as though she’d never been.

BUT I do think that we’re making women crazy (NOT legally crazy. Just crazy-crazy.) with the messaging that they must be super-duper influential and successful in a way that doesn’t include what their every instinct clamors for. And in that environment, this botch of a trial and (largely or greatly) memorex support is going to cause more murders of innocents who have done nothing to deserve it. Women who are unstable, or simply feel guilty for giving in and having kids, are going to think she did a great thing and they can do it too without consequence. May G-d have mercy on their souls, and on the souls of the idiot feminists who encouraged this aberration of a culture.

I don’t think money from government for raising children will change that perception either. It’s more like you fell down all the social ladder rungs to welfare recipient.

What is needed is real social and cultural labor, rebuilding the thought that yes, men and women are different, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with their biological imperatives, though there can be with the way those imperatives are brought to fruition. There is nothing shameful in birthing children or in wanting to raise your own children. In fact it is right and good. And there’s nothing inherently wrong in wanting to sire children and provide for your mate and children. It is right and just. It’s the way men were built.

As for the financial point, forgiving student loans would go a long way towards doing what the subsidy for stay at home parents won’t do. No. Hear me out, the “working class” would not pay for it. They’ve already paid for it. In a fiat currency situation, those loans came from inflating away the money in your pocket so the government could send pallets of cash to the Universities to support Beardo The Weirdo in the comfort he wanted to attain. That money is gone. Inflation can’t be fixed. (Well, deflation happens, but trust me, you don’t want that.) It already happened. The pay back is just swelling the coffers of the Obamacare insanity. It’s time to drop that, and let those who want have the large families they crave. There is any number of them. The others, no money can tempt.

Moving on, there was also Bernie Sanders introducing a law to forbid AI programming and wanting jail for 20 years for those engaging in it.

Give the man credit. The damn commie is still serving his masters in the (defunct?) USSR and China, as slavishly as he can. So, he’s loyal at least.

But also, one reason commies are damned is that they continuously try to take us back to their ideal state of “labor” which is circa the 1930s. AI (Which Russia and China might be able to snuff out here, but will never develop to its full potential, because the rats in their heads eat innovation.) is a threat to that, as much as computers, working from home, and everything else but the state of shoulder-to-shoulder foundry work seems to be.

Commies misunderstand labor as much as they misunderstand everything else. (Except distribution. They don’t so much misunderstand distribution as deny it, and try to make it non existent by penalizing taking money for transport and resale. Because like Marx they think things should just automagically appear where needed, or something.)

And though I hope no one else is crazy enough to sign onto comrade Sanders’ nonsense, let me reiterate that it would be utterly suicidal. The type of society the communists crave, industrial, compact, mass-organized, cannot support our current population. In fact it could never support any population. Communism is a parasitical system where countries infected must invade and despoil other countries MERELY to survive.

There is no country in the world that can support the US at our current lifestyle. Hell, I’m not sure invading the rest of the world and taking everything they own would do it.

So we’ll have to labor (eh) to keep communism at bay (yet again. The damn thing won’t die. It needs a stake through the heart, but it doesn’t have a heart and therein lies the rub.)

And we must labor to solve our problems without falling into communist solutions of having the government pay for everything we want.

The hour is late. The light is failing. We have much to do.

Go and build under, build over, build around. Build sanely and fruitfully.

And may your labor be blessed.

65 thoughts on “Labor”

  1. “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” has turned into “I Am Woman Hear Me Whine.” [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]

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  2. Make it socially acceptable and financially feasible for women to stay home and raise the kids and for men to be the sole breadwinner again :) It’s a little awkward compared to MAGA though! And to be honest I think it’d be in our best interest to adjust it just a bit so that it’s “make it socially acceptable and financially feasible for one person to be the earner and the other to raise the kids, regardless of which one it is”, while acknowledging that the law of statistics means that’s usually going to be male breadwinner and female child-rearer.

    Labor unions tend to be led by those who are terrible at laboring. Because they’re commies, and value only division. I value those who work hard, and those who make it possible to work hard (even if these path-smoothers/paper-pushers/contract-signers are ‘management/supervisors’).

    I’m putting too much thought into it, it’s a day off… but that’s my thoughts.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. This is how useless labor unions are…Ilhan Omar published, on X, a picture of herself sitting smiling in a bright red tractor-trailer covered in Teamsters local so-and-so branding. And then locked replies so nobody could call her out on it, because she is chickenpoop.

      So let’s think about this. Teamsters represent truck drivers in many short-haul areas. That person sitting in the cab is a Somali fraud who married her own brother to get into the country. What’s one of the biggest threats to unionized truck drivers right now? Illegal and foreign drivers who get cheeki breeki sneeki CDLs (looking at you, Gavin) without being able to read a single road sign and price American truckers out of their jobs while killing people on the highways.

      And they let her take a publicity shot in THEIR truck.

      Unions are officially useless. They are nothing but slush funds for the far Left now, who will happily co-opt and destroy them if they take power. But the fat cats at union headquarters will become apparatchiks and do just fine. The rank and file worker? The Party needs you to work eight hours more a week to meet the new Five-Year Plan, comrade, get to it!

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      1. We were not happy to have to join a union at our first jobs. I eventually got to wave it good bye, but hubby is (technically) a member even now in retirement.

        But … until the retirement problem with retirement funds being company stock (not the problem for this union, no stock involved), the union in question above was ONE company, 5 local regions, but ONE company. Even the other companies that did the same exact work had unions, but their own unions.

        Another difference with the union, the members were elected to (whatever) offices, but they did NOT get paid for taking those offices. At least not a salary. They did get compensated if they had to take work hours off non-pay for union businesses. So did any rank and file member.

        The one thing that drove us both nuts was the employer inability to fire anyone who couldn’t do the job. As hubby said “Document. Document. Document. It is possible. But cannot on just a whim.”

        The union is where hubby gets his non-social-security retirement. Where we got retiree insurance at decent family rates until we both qualified for medicare advantage. The union is where hubby learned from professionals on stock, etc., financial strategies (from being on the Pension/401(k) board).

        Where it became less desirable was when the union had to merge with the Carpenters & Joiners (best option) because of changing funding percentage requirements on pensions.

        But most unions? In spades.

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    2.  “make it socially acceptable and financially feasible for one person to be the earner and the other to raise the kids, regardless of which one it is”

      I’d agree with that, wholeheartedly – in my own family, one of my brothers was at home while their children were small doing freelance graphic design, and being there for the kids day to day, while his wife worked full-time as a teacher.

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  3. The USSR is not defunct and will not be until the generation that survived it passes away.

    I could hope in violence, with 9mm to the back of the head or a hangman’s knot strangling them to death as they hang, but I’ll take “died in bed like Stalin”, too. ;-)

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    2. I fear two generations, or three. Though a massive failure by Putin and several of his not-yet-defenestrated apperatchicks might speed things a bit.

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  4. I guess subsidizing women who stay home with their kids is moderately better than insisting that what all women need is free daycare. But in general, I share your concerns.

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  5. Communism is a parasitical system where countries infected must invade and despoil other countries MERELY to survive.

    That explains the incessant whining about “wars for oil.” Really? If we weren’t forced to cap production we wouldn’t need to even buy it from anyone else. As for “wars for oil”…. Go brush your teeth. I can smell what you’ve eaten from here. Ugh.

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    1. Actually, the U.S. (well actually oil companies in the U.S.) buy oil from overseas because in the 70s – 90s when we were importing a lot of oil the refineries upgraded their equipment to efficiently process heavy sour crude.Domestic fracking provides light sweet crude.So we import what the refineries were optimized for and export the light sweet crude, which less sophisticated refineries can process, overseas .

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    2. It’s a socialism thing in general, and not limited to communism. Nazi Germany *had* to start invading other countries (for plunder) to keep paying the bills. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Il Duce was confronted with a similar issue.

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  6. There is something deeply wrong with those celebrating ‘that Clancy harpy’ as A Cause.

    Clancy is a monster and needs to be locked up, if not for life, at least for a verrreee long time.

    On the other hand, she had a lot of help becoming a monster. “It’s a fair cop, but it’s society’s to blame.” She was very badly served by the government/corporate/medical conglomerate. We should definitely be runnin’ them in too. What we should emphatically NOT be doing is giving them more power to ruin more people’s lives.

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    1. Kirk (who used to comment here, and at Chicagoboyz) speculated in a comment thread on Insty that she might have developed an addiction while working as a nurse – diverting patient meds to herself – and part of the mental problem and the serious doctor-shopping later might have been a means of coping with drug withdrawal. It’s a theory – and only a suggested one – but it is one which sounds logical to me. Kirk apparently had encountered a female troop who while working in the post hospital became an addict – and subsequently melted down very messily and in spectacular manner.

      In any case – I don’t care if the b**ch spends the rest of her life in the local nut hut or prison. Lock her up for the rest of her life, wheelchair and all.

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  8. I was watching something unrelated on Yoo-Toob and found out that Labor Day was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland in 1894. Shortly after signing, he sent feds to break the American Railway Union’s Pullman Strike. Typical two-faced politician.

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    1. The reason Cleveland broke the Pullman strike was because the strikers were holding up, and interfering with, the US Mail. Mail cars were jammed up because of the strike.

      One thing that WILL rouse Uncle Sam is meddling with the mails. I think that if the 2020 “mail in vote” brouhaha is ever honestly investigated, there will be a lot of people on their way to federal prison. And I’ll be standing here waving “bye-bye!”

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  9. In this case it is the crazy propaganda work by feminists, for decades now, both casting men as the villain and women as the victims in everything AND making women feel as if “settling” for being a wife and mother is a failure. 

    Not quite.

    It makes it so that those who choose to be a wife and mother are acceptable targets.

    I know I’m doing important work.

    That doesn’t make it so the thus-far metaphorical rocks turn to flowers of glory.

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      1. :shrugs:
        Is iron that was painted decently, so it did not rust down, strong when it can take road gravel, then be painted over again with rustolium before those strikes can spread rot, strong?

        Or just better able to deal with damage, and prevent it spreading?

        Folks have a lot of strong in them at the start; how they’re tempered and treated matters a lot for how much damage they can take. (And life is damage, anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. Not rustolium, either.)

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  10. Apparently this version of, “Pay women to have kids,” came from Vance. If (and I say “if”) he really believes the stuff attributed to him, he’s beginning to worry me.

    I said during Trump 1.0 that what the left didn’t realize was there would be a kid (or maybe someone a bit older than a kid) watching all this and saying to himself, “When I take power I won’t make Trump’s mistakes. I won’t show anyone any mercy; I’ll take care of them all before they start their BS campaigns.” IOW, a wannabe Franco.

    There are some very bitter people in my corner of Twitter. Because they see this as just another hand stuck into their pockets, forcing them to work to let other people live in leisure.

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  11. We react differently to gain and losses. Instead of paying directly, find a way to cut taxes further on families with children, and to reduce (not eliminate!) medical costs of pregnancy and childbearing, and especially exceptional costs. The latter would be a temptation to insurance padding and fraud, so it woyld need to be monitored.

    And break the left’s helicopter-parent demand.

    On a different tack, undermine the strong anti-family bias built into the entertainment industry. That will require effort from the writers, screenwriters, producers, etc., and the opening of distribution channels. I doubt you could do a modern Romper Room–but prove me wrong!–but modern versions of Captain Kangaroo are surely possible. (Not the actual copyright stuff, but the flavor and style.)

    Who would do these? Backing from conservative church groups and other conservative organizations are might work.

    (Oh, and prepend, not append.)

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    1. I always heartily endorse cutting taxes and returning responsibility to the individual citizen or, at worst, the local community, wherever possible (and it’s more possible than people tend to think)!

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  12. As far as ‘they aren’t having babies’ goes, that is VERY dependent on the sub-culture.

    those who got the Leftist indoctrination are not having kids, that is true. but those who resisted and are in the smallish minority that still have good ties to family, community, and church are still having larger families.

    Frankly, I’m not sure that it is a bad thing that the people of the Left are not having kids, that will go a long way towards that subculture dying off in a couple generations. We just need to stop their recruiting

    spit out the black pill, visit your local (non-woke) churches (all varieties) and relax.

    Yes, it will be painful at times as the new generation will be smaller, but it’s not a death spiral overall, just for specific sub-cultures.

    The good news is that we are getting a new round of labor saving devices to make it so that it will be easier to care for the elderly than it was in the past, and per-body productivity is going to climb still further (Thank you Elon Musk for much of it). This should greatly ease the bottleneck

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    1. That’s (one) reason why so many leftists in education/academia – they tend to eschaw or minimize having spawn of their own, so they must indoctrinate your offspring for the movement to continue.

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  13. Labor Day in the US was originally on May First, and it started here (Chicago, after the Haymarket “riots” and what followed.) States had it all over the place, those states that had a Day for Labor. Then labor unions (machinists, carpenters, and steam-fitters, then garment workers and others) opted to move it to August, later September, for two reasons. First, better weather in the Northeast for parades, demonstrations, and cookouts. Second, in the anti-immigrant push of the early 1900s, May 1st was seen as tied to foreigners after Socialist unions and parties in other countries picked up the date.

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  14. Huh, I had bacon and eggs this morning, too! I made mine though.

    Had a grandpa who was a strong union man. So strong, he even supported Jess Unruh for president in the 70s.

    Unions have done a lot for working people, but they wouldn’t have been necessary if business owners were only a little bit more solicitous of their workers. Once relations went adversarial, the commies moved into the unions and took control of them. My dad had a union job, but the international told them to settle with management during a strike. The union didn’t want to bother with his smaller unions. Reagan smashing the ATC union was applauded in all right thinking homes.

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    1. By the time the unions got bit in the US the business owners were doing things. The bad time was with a lot of immigrants coming in and taking jobs where they could without regard for conditions. And almost every union had strong ties to the USSR operatives.

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      1. No doubt about that. Even when it was exposed, leftists pooh poohed it. Commies are a danger to our way of life. All the commie types today seem to be foreigners.

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    2. The dangerous ones are the state/Federal employee unions. Giving them collective bargaining rights was a serious mistake.

      I am a “member” of the Mail Handlers Union but that was simply to get health insurance (BC/BS of our state kept pretending beloved hadn’t filled out the paperwork and demanded a new set for every claim). Never belonged to or supported “our” unions and would enjoy watching them melt down. Partly inherited animosity, may be partly due to my time as a GS-9 doing the GS-12 union rep’s work for him while he did “important,” things like posting bizarre rants on the union bulletin board.

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  15. Firearms are why the United States can exist.

    Firearms ownership rights directly led to women’s suffrage making sense.

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    1. Also to old folks surviving much longer.

      And the non-brutal being able to stand against the mob.

      Anybody who can’t ugga ugga the situation, nor call up a swarm.

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  16. When I was in Panama, my Polish girlfriend was shocked! SHOCKED! that I was working on May 1. “But that’s the day of international labor solidarity!”

    “Sorry, Miel, I work on a United States Air Force base. We don’t go in for that Communist s(tuff) there. If it makes you feel better, you and your roommate may lift a glass of your favorite wine in solidarity with me as you relax by the pool this afternoon.”

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  17. One big problem with a lot of unions (particularly in the garment industry and the entertainment industry) is that they are, all too often, shakedown rackets. Bad guys get into control one way or another, and they use the threat of strikes to get payoffs from the bosses, as well as looting the unions’ pension funds. And union members who try to protest or throw the bums out have “accidents” of one sort or another.

    I remember a joke I saw in MAD Magazine once: “What union is more powerful and dangerous than the Teamsters’ Union?” The answer was: “The Soviet Union!”

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    1. Mom very carefully explained the Company Store and various other things that unions counter-weighted.

      Let us absorb it.

      And then explained that the only unionizers she’d known of growing up rolled into town and tried to force the loggers to unionize against the mill, and they were threatening folks’ families on both sides of that equation to get support, even though the mill owner was the kind of guy who routinely cut himself short so that his workers got paid.

      Monopolies have money involved, and that brings in predators, even if the monopoly is on who’s allowed to sell their labor.

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      2. The local company timber mills did not organize. The corporate ones did.

        It is pretty much toothless, thanks to the owl and mountain, but the contractor single company unions (three total) organized for consistent safety protocols, that applied whether one was working at a truck ramp or in a log yard.

        After I was “out” (grin) I remember coming into a yard (baby car seat swap) where hubby had complained that the yard foreman had moved the shack to an unsafe location. The guys had made their safety concern comments, and were in the process of officially filing. All it took was one spouse commenting “I really do not want to have to own half this place”, to get the shack moved.

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      3. During the time beloved was working for Huge Heartless Corporation, helping them set up a chicken processing plant, union organizers tried to get in. Management swore up and down on a notional stack of Bibles they were working to improve things and the workers voted against organizing.

        Mangement then threw out the notional Bibles and continued screwing people over. The next set of union organizers were successful, you betcha.

        One of the few times I’ve agreed a union was necessary.

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    2. 100 years ago unions served a purpose. Labor abuses were real, and fairly widespread. Today, labor abuse is illegal, largely because of laws backed by the unions. The Great And Noble Cause triumphed. The job is done. But, the Iron Law Of Bureaucracy still applies. They can’t just declare victory and go home. Unions today exist for the sake of their own existence. The union bosses have more in common with the Eeevul Corporate Capitalists than with their members.

      I don’t have The Answer. One policy that would help would be to make it as illegal to force people to join a union as it is to prevent them from joining. Government unions should also be illegal. If We The People are being robbed to pay your salary, you don’t get to hold us up for even more money. If you’re dissatisfied, you can quit and get a real job that contributes to the economy instead of dragging it down.

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      1. I got a kick out of the unions rolling into town to try to unionize BiMart and Winco. Um … They are employee owned … Jerry’s was another local company (there are 2 or 3 locations). Family owned. Employees overwhelming said “NO”.

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        1. Yeah, I laughed to see protesters outside our local Winco many years back. They really didn’t get the “employee-owned” designation.

          Who are you unionizing against? Yourself?

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          1. I actually went and chatted with the ones when they tried it at our Seattle Blob Winco.

            …. they weren’t union members.

            The protesters were all paid by the union to stand there “protesting.”

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          2. They really didn’t get the “employee-owned” designation.

            Wasn’t that they didn’t “get it.” They didn’t believe it, and no amount of counter evidence was going to make them believe.

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  18. Many years back, I read a lengthy article on birth rates in developed countries. This article actually tried to make analyses of why that might be. One of the countries at the extreme low end was Italy—which, BTW, had monetary incentives for maternity. Two that they looked at for the higher end were Sweden and the US.

    The conclusions they came to were interesting. The birth rate seems to rely a lot on the employment situation. In Italy, employment is so strictly regulated that it’s almost impossible to fire someone—which ultimately means that if you leave employment, it’s almost impossible to re-enter it. Women simply aren’t going to leave a job in order to have children, and many don’t even want to have one lest it means they have to quit.

    In Sweden, there are strong maternal protection policies, so having a kid or kids doesn’t mean you’re unemployable. And in the US, despite the lack of maternal protection that is derided through the rest of the world, it’s so easy to fire and re-hire that even taking a couple of decades off to raise multiple children isn’t a bar to working again.

    So it’s not the “getting paid to have kids” that works. Italy shows that. It’s making it so that motherhood isn’t a forever-bomb to your economic wellbeing. (And yes, telecommuting opportunities, especially those with task-based flexible scheduling, would definitely help mothers.)

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    1. “telecommuting opportunities, especially those with task-based flexible scheduling, would definitely help mothers“

      –

      One or more of the parents at least.

      Was not an viable option when I went back to work when son was 9 months old. Had no choice to not work. Not with one of us in an industry that saw lack-of-work unpaid time off annually. Bit of a disappointment that my career change was less steady than perception. OTOH eventually the work from home was becoming viable. Hubby’s job that was not an option.

      Liked by 1 person

  19. Bernie Sanders… Some idiot at work put a quote of his about income inequality on the white board in the break room, and it got several plus-ones and yaaasss responses. *vomit* So I put up the Mencken quote about the urge to save humanity being a false front for the desire to rule over it. (No plus-ones for me…oh, well. Maybe I should’ve put up Winston Churchill’s excoriation of socialism, but I thought it was probably too long, and maybe a bit too pointed.)

    Hey, workplace Bernie Bros… You know why the guy who founded the company we work for has enough money to buy a brand-new luxury vehicle every six months and had to move across state lines to escape this socialist-infested state’s new “wealth tax”? And why you and I don’t? Because he invented something that modernized a global industry, built a multi-billion dollar company around it. A company that created stable, well-paid jobs for 7,000 people and counting. He didn’t take money from anybody; he EARNED it by making something people wanted and that improved life for everybody else…and by creating the opportunity for us to earn our own money in the process.

    And we who didn’t revolutionize an entire industry or create thousands of new jobs — and meanwhile are being paid quite generously by that rich guy to work in his enterprise — what the heck gives any of us any sort of right to take more from that guy simply because he made more?

    The socialist mind virus has eaten far too many brains.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. New developments!

      Shortly after morning break, somebody erased the idiotic Bernie Sanders quote from the board. Then, by the time I took my usual late lunch, some marxian moron had replaced it with with “Eat the rich!” (And two other idiots had put their plus-one on that turd in the punchbowl.) When I came back from lunch, intending to call that out for what it was, someone else had erased it and put Adam Smith’s quote, “With great property comes great inequality,” in its place. Good enough.

      This, by the way, in the midst of people putting up snippets of poetry and their favorite quotes from movies and books.

      But leftists are utterly incapable of leaving other people alone. Saint Augusto of the Whirling Blades, spare us your necessities.

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  20. You know… I suspect that men NEED to support women, in most cases, in order for the spouse thing to work.

    Just like I suspect that most women have a powerful drive to run the inside household, most men want to run the household in the world.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Most men want to build things. Look at the stereotypical ‘boys toys’ — trains, Erector sets, Legos, tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, Tonka construction equipment…

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      1. Also as noted occasionally in various places, the stereotype for the romantic male protagonist in male-coded fiction is that he has to do something notable to win the right to pursue the female lead (which usually leads to her immediate acceptance). The stereotype for the romantic female protagonist in female-coded fiction is that the male lead pursues her because she’s just so… her.

        Assuming a basis in what each gender is interested in, that would suggest that men in general are indeed more generally interested in creating genuine accomplishments. Though as always, individuals are not “in general”.

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      2. Imaginos, are you misgendering me? I spent most of my childhood building things: Legos, balsa wood cars, tube radios.
        …. I still am. mostly furniture, but occasionally whole garden structures.

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