Erm... a small edit. The post above should read: "The fact is that humans have never had it so good, yet those middle-class women keep demanding ever more, pretending that they're badly off to do so. It's not an edifying sight."

Don't know what happened there.

Antiseptic
"The fact is that our society needs a very broad range of capacities in both temperament and aptitude. The qualities that make a person a good lawyer are not the same qualities that make a good mechanic, but we need both if we are to have a functional society."

It's really easy to get more people with limited ability if you want them. Just open the immigration floodgates. The immigration points system is sort-of an IQ test with pointys awarded for higher qualifications, english language (which means ability to learn a second language in most cases), business skills and money.

Let the floodgates open and see how quickly our relatively 'functional' and harmonious becomes riven by distrust and rising crime. Why do you think all the leftie-professionals choose to live in nice white anglo-celtic ghetto suburbs like Sydney's inner west? That way they can call for more immigration, and still avoid seeing the damage it does on society.

If you look at what makes countries wealthy an harmonious, you see a combination of high IQ and low diversity. Japan is one of the world's most racially pure nations and Japanese have slightly higher IQ than europeans. Despite being a tiny, overpopulated resource poor nation, they are the world's second largest economy. Europe was similar 20 years ago, but due to high birth-rates of immigrants is becomming less so.

The USA, despite huge population and amazing natural wealth, suffers from the handicap of high diversity, and isn't as powerful as it should be.

..."racial purity"

Should be some ground-breaking anthropology to be read here very soon.

Rusty

Part time parent, we've moved a long way from the discussion of parental leave.

I'm not sure how you link middle-class welfare to immigration, or to "racial purity" - these seem very different creatures.

Speaking for myself, I reckon that immigration of non-Anglo/Celtic peoples has been a positive for this country. I'd like to see it slowed, not because of the multi-cultural aspect, but because the country's holding capacity is limited.

Middle-class welfare is as unsustainable whether immigration exists or not.

Antiseptic I am not trying to reduce this argument to reductionism either (not sure where you got that from). The main premise of my stance is we are losing the rights to raise a family the 'old fashioned' way - as if a value about raising children can be categorised so easily.

Some people do believe raising a child goes beyond bonding with a baby for more than eight weeks. We only ask that the welfare agenda isn't skewed towards the middle classes to satisfy some long term economic agenda. This is morally bankrupt and just more of the government's social engineering of what is the'working family' norm that everyone has to buy into.

I am about choices but taking responsibility for choices rather than to the detriment of other more important infrastructure. This issue is far too important to be used in the gender agenda IMO.

Antiseptic and Pelican

Have a look at this map of world poverty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Basically the more red, the more poverty... But the surprise is that it is a map of FERTILITY - how many children are being born. You are worried about our carrying capacity... Throughout Africa every two adults are having up to an average of 6 kids! No wonder the farmland is overgrazed, the trees are becomming rare due to over-harvesting for cooking fuel, the water is running out, the deserts are growing and the poor people faced with starvation, often choose to back a corrupt tribal leader who engages in tribal genocide.. as we saw in Rwanda.

We have the opposite problem in the west. We are aging because we are slowly suiciding. We are failing to replace ourselves as there are too few babies.

We need to give parents tax reductions, so they can afford the kids they want. That's called middle class welfare, but it's really an acknowledgement of the fact taht kids cost money, and without help, too many people choose the selfish route of childlessness.