Tag Archives: Male

Why is it so hard for a working man to provide for a family these days?

Here’s my argument which answers the question:

  1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce.
  2. Making it easier to divorce means that more divorces will occur.
  3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government.
  4. In the latest election (2008), exit polls showed that UNMARRIED women voted 3-1 for Obama.

*Please note that I am talking about unmarried women throughout this post.

Here’s the evidence for each point.

1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce, according to this feminist, pro-no-fault-divorce writer.

Excerpt:

Households of 2010 don’t look quite like they did in 1969, when no-fault divorce actually was a controversial topic and these counter-arguments held some weight. The working dad/stay-at-home mom model of the middle class has been replaced by two-parent earner households and a growing number of working mom/stay-at-home dad arrangements. In working poor and impoverished families, the one-parent provider model was never the norm. No-fault divorce seemed scary when it had never before existed, but the truth is that its introduction was long overdue. Feminist groups at the time supported no-fault divorce, as it provided women an escape hatch from desperately unhappy marriages in a society where they were already disadvantaged on almost every level, regardless of their marital status. Imagine an abusive marriage in 1968, when the court-savvy abuser could actually force the victim to stay in the relationship forever. Imagine that now, and you know why domestic violence attorneys are in full support of introducing no-fault divorce to New York. And the judges aren’t the only problem.

Note that the author of this piece thinks that it is not women’s fault that they choose men who they then want to divorce. It’s not the woman’s fault that she is unhappy with the man she courted with and then chose and then made vows to – women need a no-fault escape hatch, and children do fine without fathers.

2. Easier divorces means more divorces.

Abstract:

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to “easier divorce” that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit the different timing of the reforms in divorce laws across countries. We account for unobserved country-specific factors by introducing country fixed effects, and we include country-specific trends to control for timevarying factors at the country level that may be correlated with divorce rates and divorce laws, such as changing social norms or slow moving demographic trends. We find that the different reforms that “made divorce easier” were followed by significant increases in divorce rates. The effect of no-fault legislation was strong and permanent, while unilateral reforms only had a temporary effect on divorce rates. Overall, we estimate that the legal reforms account for about 20 percent of the increase in divorce rates in Europe between 1960 and 2002.

It seems obvious, but more evidence never hurts.

3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government for security.

Excerpt:

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws.

[…]More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes. 19

Bigger government must be paid for by higher taxes, of course, which makes it harder for one working man’s income to provide for a family. In fact, feminists wanted men to be displaced as sole-providers. They would prefer that women are “equal” to men, and that means making women get out and work like men. Feminists had every reason to want bigger government and higher taxes to make traditional single-earner families unfeasible financially. They did it for equality.

4. Women are in fact observed to vote for bigger government. (Original story was here, now pulled)

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election. Analysts will spend the next few months sifting through the data, trying to figure out what happened and why. Historians will likely spend the next several years and decades studying this election, as well. But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

And since the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, and then the Presidency in 2008, the national debt has doubled from 8 trillion to 16 trillion.

Voting for Democrats means voting for bigger government which means voting for higher taxes to pay for it all. Higher taxes means that a married man can no longer retain enough of his earnings to support a family. And that means his wife has to work, and that means that his children will learn what the government schools decide they should learn – so that all the children will be equal and think the same (pro-government) thoughts. This should not be controversial, because it is what it is. Very often, women complain about the very problems that they themselves have caused with their own voting, and their own embrace of feminism and rejection of the traditional roles of men as protectors, providers, and moral/spiritual leaders.

So, you have women voting to defund actual providers so that they are free to make babies with good-looking non-committing, non-providers – like in the UK Daily Mail story that I recently blogged about. Feminists often don’t want to share parenting duties with a man – they prefer government social programs instead of a man. And liberal feminist politicians also oppose encouraging traditional marriage with tax breaks. In the feminist UK, IVF is free – paid for by the British taxpayer (including male sole-providers!) making single motherhood by choice much more common. Here’s the result of that: single mother of 10 receives 30,000 British pounds per year in benefits. A recent study showed that the cost of family breakdown to the American taxpayer is $112 billion per year and a recent UK study showed that the UK taxpayer pays 9 billion pounds per year for “problem families”. This money is in addition to the growth of government caused by liberal voting patterns, documented above.

And that’s why “a man working full time [cannot] actually support a family and buy a house, as the sole income earner”, as one philosopher recently asked.

Friday night movie: Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Here’s tonight’s movie:

IMDB mean rating: [7.6/10]

IMDB median rating: [8/10]

Description:

Four robbers hold up an armored truck, getting away with over a million dollars in cash. Joe Rolfe (John Payne), a down-on-his-luck flower delivery truck driver is accused of being involved and is roughly interrogated by local police. Released due to lack of evidence, Joe, following the clues to a Mexican resort, decides to look for the men who set him up both to clear his name and to exact revenge.

If you liked last week’s film noire, you’re going to love this week’s film noire.

Happy Friday!

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Friday night movie: Double Indemnity (1944)

Here’s tonight’s movie:

IMDB rating: [8.5/10]

Description:

Double Indemnity is a 1944 American film noir, directed by Billy Wilder, co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and produced by Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Sistrom. The script was based on James M. Cain’s 1935 novella of the same title which originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine.

The film stars Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman, Barbara Stanwyck as a provocative housewife who wishes her husband were dead, andEdward G. Robinson as a claims adjuster whose job is to find phony claims. The term double indemnity refers to a clause in certain life insurance policies that doubles the payout in cases when death is caused by accidental means.

Praised by many critics when first released, Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards but did not win any. Widely regarded as a classic, it is often cited as a paradigmatic film noir and as having set the standard for the films that followed in that genre.

Deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1992, Double Indemnity was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 1998, it was ranked #38 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films of the 20th century, and in 2007 it was 29th on their 10th Anniversary list.

This movie is good because it undoes the popular notion in today’s culture that all women are sweet and cute and never do anything wrong, whereas all men are beasts. And it’s a warning to men not do dismiss Judeo-Christian morality, specifically the prohibitions on murder and adultery. This movie is extremely consistent with the Bible’s teachings, and it’s a thriller to boot.

This movie had a formative influence on me when I was a young man, and helped me to be more realistic about separating a woman’s physical appearance from her moral character. Just because a woman is physically attractive, it doesn’t mean that she is morally good. And there is no corelation between physical beauty and suitability for marriage. This is a lesson that all men should learn. Sweetness and kindness and self-sacrifice are not automatic for any woman, you have to choose one who can do the job.

Happy Friday!

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