Morality is an Economic Issue

A recurring issue with me, I know. But my impression is that many Christians don't see the connection between the so-called economic issues and the social issues.

Welfare incentivizes immorality, and immorality undermines productivity, and an inability to produce makes one a candidate for welfare. Vicious cycle. Start it wherever you want. Start with immorality...leads to unproductive and welfare. Start with unproductive...leads to welfare and immorality.

John Kasich is the GOP candidate most obviously missing the connection on these issues. I am disappointed to see his misguided application of the Bible. Private charity can be given with accountability for moral behavior; government "charity" purports to be amoral...which is impossible given that we all have a moral essence. When you give money to someone, it sends a message. If you give money to someone who qualifies for it because they have a child out of wedlock, for instance, the message reinforces the wrong choice.

See the following, now just over a week old, column from Mona Charen.

Curt

About a Boy

By Mona Charen · Oct. 23, 2015

 “It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden-variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”

 “It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden-variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”

Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View is author of the above comment. The question at hand was: Why are so many young women (64 percent of moms under the age of 30) having children out of wedlock? Nowhere is the class divide in America as wide as on the matter of marriage. College-educated men and women are sticking with the traditional order of marriage first and children second. Not only that, but they are far less likely to divorce than their parents' generation was. Those with only some college or less, by contrast, are much less likely to marry before having children, and much more likely to divorce if they do marry.

McArdle was answering her own question in a sense. She noted that many who have studied the retreat from marriage among the uneducated propose the “working class men are garbage” hypothesis. According to this view, lots of young men are unemployed and playing video games all day. Why would a young woman want to marry such a loser? She’d just be getting another kid.

But as McArdle observes, someone is enabling that behavior on the part of the young man. Someone is providing a roof over his head, putting food in his belly and paying his power bill so that the game console stays on. Is it his parents? Or is it a young woman? If she has a child (possibly his child), she is eligible for a whole panoply of government assistance, including TANF, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, low income home energy assistance, and much more. Thirty years ago, in “Losing Ground,” Charles Murray wondered whether the welfare state was enabling the sort of behavior that isn’t good for people — such as having children out of wedlock.

The question still stands. In the interim, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that was successful in reducing welfare dependency to some degree and certainly contributed to a drop in childhood poverty. Two disheartening things have happened since: 1) the Obama administration unilaterally vitiated the work requirements in the welfare law through regulation; and 2) the secular trend toward unwed parenthood continued unabated.

Is it the lack of jobs for high school graduates that has made young men less “marriageable,” or is it the retreat from marriage that makes kids who grow up in unstable home less able to take advantage of job opportunities? Chicken? Egg?

Most of the panel members agreed that causation is probably a two-way street. What is not in doubt is the association of intact families with greater wealth, employment, security, and all-around high functioning. A study by W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph Price and Robert I. Lerman found that states with higher-than-average percentages of married parents were associated with higher median incomes, lower levels of child poverty, greater social mobility and higher male labor-force-participation rates, among other measures of success, than states with higher levels of unwed parenting.

Life ain’t fair, and cannot be made perfectly fair. But it almost seems a conspiracy of silence among the college educated to keep from the working class the key secret to their success. Particularly in families with college-educated couples who don’t divorce (the vast majority), children are given security, stability, money, time, a kin network and a thousand other advantages. The children of single parents, by contrast (and yes, many do fine) are much more likely to suffer from feelings of abandonment, to live in poverty, to cope with emotional tumult in their mothers' lives (most live with Mom), to be sexually abused, to be forced to adapt to a blended family, and so on.

Also, David Autor and Melanie Wasserman suggest in their report Wayward Sons, published by Third Way magazine, “A growing body of evidence … indicates that the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys' psychosocial development and educational achievement.”

There may be lots of reasons, starting with their parents, why many young, high school educated males are unemployed and playing video games. But if young women consider them unfit husbands, they ought also to be unfit fathers, right? Unless the state is the father. Over to you, Charles Murray.

It must be the Guns' fault, not the broken families...

Illinois Family Institute published the following. It is amazing what politicians and the politically correct among us choose to focus on when bad things happen. The gun in this case, not the evil person wielding that particular instrumentality. 

I believe in the value and ability of people of every color. I recall during my public school board days attending seminars that highlighted differences in educational outcomes that happened to correlate with race; I found it highly suspicious that they never discussed (at least publicly) the question of family breakdown or parental involvement/commitment. They dare not touch on the "freedom" to divorce or to be a lousy parent.  Dr. Ben Carson is, of course, a stellar example of a challenging family situation which was overcome by a dedicated, no-excuses, committed mother.

Another point to notice in the following article: where do mass killers generally find success? Where liberal "gun free zone" policies have been implemented. Most states in the 70s, 80s and 90s banned any concealed carry in public places (i.e., public places were all "gun free zones"). All the law-abiding individuals at the community college were, thanks to gun control, sitting ducks. You never help good people by disarming them.

Curt

 **************

Cause of Violence: Guns or Family Breakdown?

Written By Laurie Higgins   |   10.05.15  

Another horrific mass killing, this time at a community college in Oregon. And once again President Obama preached against guns, proclaiming angrily that he would use this shooting for political ends. Again and again, when a man mows down innocent people, liberals put gun-ownership in their sights, which is like looking at the problem of teens who cut themselves and angrily proclaiming that the problem is easy access to razor blades. Women have access to guns too. If guns are the problem, then why aren’t any mass (or serial) killers women?

Of course, gun control and the Left’s obsession with killing the Second Amendment by a thousand regulatory cuts are political issues, but if the Left truly cared about protecting society from gun violence, they would look beyond the cheap, superficial, but good-for-rallying the troops issue of gun control. They would look at the deeper issue of family breakdown that likely contributes in some and perhaps many cases to mass killings and serial killings, and most certainly contributes to gang violence like that which plagues Obama’s adopted home of Chicago.

Perhaps guns aren’t the central problem. Perhaps the breakdown of the family inflicts incalculable harm on children. Perhaps the breakdown in the family renders boys less capable of responding in healthy ways to other trials in life. If only President Obama would use his bully pulpit to take our devotees of easy-peasy divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and fatherless and motherless homes to the woodshed, maybe he could actually do some good.

Here is a list of just American mass killers (yes, mass killers are found all over the world). Please note that not all of them used guns:

Andrew Kehoe killed 38 elementary school children, 2 teachers, 4 other adults, and wounded 58 in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927. Kehoe used explosives. His mother died when he was 5. His father remarried, and Kehoe had a poor relationship with his stepmother.

Howard Unruh killed 13 in Camden, New Jersey in 1941. His parents separated when he was 9, and he was raised by only his mother.

Richard Speck killed 8 nursing students in Chicago in 1966. He used a knife. Speck was close to his father who died when Speck was 6. His mother remarried a few years later. Speck’s stepfather was an emotionally abusive alcoholic with a criminal record.

Charles Whitman killed 16 people at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. His father emotionally and physically abused Whitman and his mother.

James Huberty killed 21 and wounded 19 at a McDonald’s in San Diego in 1984. His mother abandoned the family when he was about 10.

James Ruppert killed 11 family members in 1975 in Hamilton, Ohio. His mother told him she had wanted a girl. His father had a “violent temper and no affection” for James or his older brother Leonard. His father died when James was 12. His 14-year-old brother assumed the role of patriarch and bullied James.

George Hennard killed 23 and wounded 27 at a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas in 1991. Hennard’s childhood was turbulent and unstable as was his parent’s marriage which ended in divorce when Hennard was 27.

James Pough killed 9 and wounded 4 in 1990 in Jacksonville, Florida. His father left Pough and his eight younger siblings when Pough was 11.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured 600 in Oklahoma City in 1995. He used explosives. His mother walked out on the family when he was 10. He was raised by his father who worked nights. The children rarely saw their mother.

Michael McLendon killed 10 in Alabama in 2009. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his aunt and uncle.

Adam Lanza killed 20 elementary school children, 6 staff members, and his mother in Newton, Connecticut in 2012. His parents separated when he was 16 and divorced when he was 17.

Wade Michael Page killed 6 and wounded 4 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s parents divorced when he was young. His father remarried when Page was 10. His mother died when he was 13. Reportedly, Page did not get along with his father, and at some point in his school years, his father and stepmother moved out of state, leaving him to split his time between his aunt and his grandmother.

Dylann Roof killed 9 in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015. Roof was raised in an unstable family in which his father verbally and physically abused his stepmother.

Chris Harper-Mercer killed 10 and wounded 9 in Roseburg, Oregon in 2015. His parents separated when he was less than 1 year-old.

Twenty years ago, an article in the Washington Post offered a painful image of the future:

Psychologists have warned for years that young people like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have planted a virus in American society with still unrealized capacity for damage.

The author may be wrong about one thing: It seems unlikely that economic frustrations could result in the desire to go on a killing spree. Economic frustrations may be the proximate cause or a contributing factor for those whose psychological and emotional needs were not met as children, thus leaving them unable to cope with life’s obstacles. But the ultimate cause is likely something deeper, more profound than fiscal insecurity.

Of course, only a small fraction of children from dysfunctional families become mass (or serial) killers, just as only a small fraction of mentally ill, bullied, shy, or gun-owning people become mass (or serial) killers. And some mass killers grow up in intact, functioning families. But could family breakdown contribute to the impulse to do violence in some cases? Might an intact family structure help prevent such desires in children who have other conditions that put them at risk for anti-social behavior? Is there not sufficient evidence to justify the inclusion of family breakdown as a possible contributing factor in news stories and presidential pronouncements about mass killings? Is there not sufficient evidence that family breakdown may contribute to mass killings to justify studies of its potential causal effect?

Perhaps the short shrift given to the potential effects of family breakdown on children, particularly boys, reflects both our deeply embedded easy-divorce cultural ethic and the selfishness of both Democrats and Republicans—including many Christians—who don’t want to look at the damage done to children through divorce. Mass killings and gang violence should lead us to ask what we are willing to sacrifice as individuals to protect our children from the harm of family breakdown and to protect society from the effects of such harm.