Friday, February 8, 2013

The footprints of Karl Marx are stamped on every page of our recent history.

Via Bernhard

 

 Economic and Cultural Decline

“The combined effect of reliable contraception and legalized abortion has probably contributed most to the decline in fertility in the “developed nations.” The socialist states have created a demand for these means of “fertility abatement” by crafting societies where the denigration of marriage, family, religion, and private property had largely destroyed not only the traditional motivations for rearing children but the means for traditional families to afford them. 

Government spending accounts for nearly half of GDP among the countries of the European Union – almost 60 pence out of every euro when compared to personal income, two-thirds of which goes for welfare expenditures. Government confiscations on this scale largely eliminate the ability of the middle class to save, undercutting their economic independence. But what the money is spent on has an even more malignant effect.

It is an axiom of economics that you get m ore of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. The European welfare state leads to fewer economically efficient marriages, the preferred basis of child-rearing, and more unwed mothers, as well as more self-centered retirees, disassociated from the extended family and childrearing.  No-fault divorce (particularly with children involved), the prevailing consensus of post-modern feminism, and increasing tax-burdens work against any attempts to restore the primacy of the natural family.

The experience of the United States is instructive. BY 1993, the US government was spending $20,000 per individual 65 or older, regardless of his means, and $20,000 on every child in poverty (primarily the progeny of unwed mothers). Between 1970 and 1993, the real after-tax income in constant dollars of the median married family failed to grow at all, despite a 38-percent increase in productivity per hour worked and a 50-percent increase in hours worked by wives. The entire increase in the US economy went to government and its beneficiaries.

Not surprisingly, unwed motherhood soared, marriage and childrearing within marriages declined, and divorces rose. The bumper stickers on the motor homes of affluent retirees that read: “We’re spending our kids’ inheritance” should have continued “and spending our unborn grandchildren’s share as well.”

The United States currently makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet she consumes one fifth of the world’s goods. How long this can continue, if our production and reproductive values are persistently undermined by welfarism, paid for by overseas borrowing that has transformed the United States from the world’s largest creditor to the largest debtor in just two decades?    

The socialist ideology has achieved its current hegemony because of the gullibility of individuals who were told that government confiscation and redistribution of income will achieve social justice.  Given that power, the massive growth of government became irresistible, and the loss of income and of property rights was joined by a loss of rights for the family and religion and the loss of our heritage as freemen, as the growth of the power of nation-states led to unprecedented corruption.  Demographic implosions, disintegration of families, the demise of religion, and the impending economic hegemony of Asia are the bitter fruits of the European’s folly.

The same can be said of us Americans.  The footprints of Karl Marx are stamped on every page of our recent history. The only antidote is the severe curtailment of the excessive confiscations of government, thereby returning to families the means and time necessary to care for themselves and to enjoy the fruits of their labor and freedom, along with the revitalization of a culture that encourages motherhood, fatherhood, and lifelong families.”

(Europe’s Population Implosion, A Diagnosis, David A. Hartman, Chronicles, May 2004, excerpts pp. 25-25)

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