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Does government dependency make people happier and more moral?

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Here’s a funny story in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

A jobless couple rake in £95,000 in state benefits a year – and even have breakfast delivered to the door each morning, courtesy of the taxpayer.

The money – five times the starting salary of a teacher – goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rentfree four-bedroom house.

[…]The Smiths were moved last month by the local authority from a house in Bath, which the landlord accused them of wrecking, to the large house in the Bristol suburb of Kingswood.

But Mrs Smith, 36, complained that the house was too small, the breakfast portions too stingy and said she could afford to buy her brood only one Nintendo Wii games console between them.

She claims she is also forced to pay £100 a week to keep her five cats in a cattery.

‘It’s very cramped here,’ she told the News of the World. ‘We’ve been told we might not be given a new house for another nine months, which is ridiculous.

‘The breakfast supplied by the council isn’t like proper hot food. It’s usually eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes and cereal, which isn’t really enough for us all and we have to heat it up ourselves.’

[…]Mrs Smith receives up to £140-a-week child benefits for her children aged from four months to 14 years.

The family also get disability living allowance, carer’s allowance, tax credits and income support.

The total with child benefits is £44,954. They then receive a £950-aweek bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home, which comes to £49,400 – a total of £94,354 a year.

You may want to read this Arthur Brooks column that argues that it isn’t money that makes people happy – it’s the freedom to work, save and spend how you please. Arthur Brooks is the same guy who previously wrote a book showing that those who oppose redistribution of wealth give far more in charity than than those who support it. You can read about that in this article.

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Glenn Peoples lectures on religion and public policy

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Here’s the first clip of the Religion in the Public Square lecture.

He goes through the thinking of John Rawls, and explains how religious people can argue for public policies on the basis of religion. Basically, he is responding to the idea that religious people should not be allowed to participate in public policy debates because specific religious convictions and motivations cannot be used to defend any public policy, since they are personal and private.

And the rest:

And another lecture on the New Atheism, science, and morality, where he examines the thinking of New Atheist Sam Harris and old atheist Michael Ruse. Glenn is pretty moderate, so I don’t agree with him on everything. But he teaches me lots of new things because he is so darn smart, and these lectures were perfect to watch. This is intermediate to advanced material. I send the second lecture to Transparent Eye, that horrible secular humanist who sometimes comments here… and he liked it! He also liked the Mark D. Linville paper I linked to on naturalism, evolution and moral facts a while back, which was also awesome.

These lectures are ECM-approved.

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Will Canada add polgygamy and polyamory on top of same-sex marriage?

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Here’s an article from the American Spectator. (H/T RuthBlog)

Excerpt:

While the United States is occupied with the federal challenge to California’s Proposition 8, Canada has its own pending marriage case, which is likely headed for the Canadian Supreme Court. Canada, which redefined marriage nationwide to include same-sex couples in 2005, against the backdrop of successful provincial lawsuits against the country’s marriage law, could be moving on to bigger things — literally. Specifically, polygamy and polyamory, as this case invokes the question of whether the government can continue to criminalize multiple-partner marriages. The case itself, initiated by the British Columbia Attorney General under a special provision of that Province’s law, arises in the wake of failed prosecutions of polygamous sect members in British Columbia.

Advocates of polygamy and polyamory seem to have an ally in the Law Commission of Canada, a statutory body of government appointees who propose changes to modernize Canadian law and report to the Justice Ministry. In 2001, the Commission issued a report, Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing and Supporting Close Personal Adult Relationships, that questioned the continuing illegality of consensual polygamy in Canada.

Polyamory is the end-game of proponents of same-sex marriage, but it poses even more problems for children:

If we take seriously the idea that marriage laws have an educative function, polyamory raises red flags. On each of the core functions of marriage — promoting fidelity, providing a tie between children and parents, securing permanence for spouses and their children — polyamory seems particularly harmful. Both traditional polygamy and polyamory promote types of infidelity (though the former is of a more orderly variety), of course, but the chaos of polyamory blurs distinctions of parenthood more significantly than does a setting where a child has an established set of parents and lots of half-siblings. The ethic of “choice” at the root of polyamory does not bode well for permanence either.

As complicated as the day to day existence must be for children in homes with multiple adults acting as “parents,” the breakup of polyamorous relationships would be dramatically more complicated for children. There would be an exponential increase in the possible divisions of a child’s time, of decision-making authority and demands for the child’s loyalty, when the dispute involves three or more people than when only two disputants are involved.

Clearly, when it comes to marriage, the adage “the more the merrier” does not apply.

I should note that research on legalizing polygamy is funded by the government in Canada. The 3 authors of that study are feminists, and like third-wave feminists, they oppose the unequal gender roles inherent in traditional marriage. Studies showing the harm caused by polygamy and polyamory presumably do not receive funding from the government, since those studies would not create domestic-dispute-resolution work for the government’s courts. Traditional marriage is bad for government, because it doesn’t require bigger government agencies, or more social programs. Traditional marriage has to go if government is to continue to expand its power.

At some point, I would expect the government to begin to regard traditional marriages and families with suspicion and distaste.