IS CHILDBIRTH NATIONAL SERVICE?: Will Wilkinson replies to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam...More importantly, the ways in which military service and parturition advance the continued existence of societies tangles in the nation-state are, well, different. Members of the military, ideally, preserve our right to life and self-government by protecting us from agressive interlopers who would kill or rule us on terms not are own. Furthermore, being a state is about having a monopoly on force over a region. A defense force is in some sense constitutive of having a state. Now, no babies, eventually no state. True. But the real worry here is not no babies, but too few babies to support our our massive middle class entitlement programs. That is, babies-as-public good is predicated on the idea of babies-as-tax-base. ...
I like the idea of pro-family policy (as long as that includes a non-bigoted notion of the family). I truly believe that families are a foundational social institution, and that we would all be a bit better off if families were stronger, and even bigger. But the family is the private institution par excellence, and you cannot protect or advance the integrity of the family by eroding the distinction between the public and the private. I worry, and I think many others would worry, that when the state starts rewarding us for childbearing, that effaces the public/private distinction, and opens up a crack into the private sphere that the state is bound to try to squeeze through. The agents of the state will see themselves as having a legitimate interest not only in the quanitity of children, but in their quality, and start shaping policy meant to tell us HOW we should raise our children, and, worse, start shaping policy meant to tell us WHO should have them. Let's stay away from that.
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posted by Eve at
5:24 PM | link
...the state will see themselves as having a legitimate interest not only in the quanitity of children, but in their quality, and start shaping policy meant to tell us HOW we should raise our children, and, worse, start shaping policy meant to tell us WHO should have them. Let's stay away from that
Lets not go there??? Why are we talking about leaving?
Aren't all these things legitimate State Interests? Certainly they have been, traditionally. Of course the only thing that protects us from tyranny is our commitment to Liberty -- "the State" is (or should be) nothing more that the collective will of We the People, awkwardly expressed.
I think the people agree that it is a legitimate right -- indeed a Duty -- to protect the cultural wealth and the principles of American democracy, by doing everything possible (but nothing coercive) to ensure that the soldiers of tomorrow are strong, bright, loyal, and plentiful.
Scouts honor.
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