salpetre, you talk about society's responsibilities but what you mean is men's responsibilities. A number of times on this thread people have talked about responsibilities but never in relation to women. What exactly are women's responsibilities?

There is an almost 20% advantage in the number of women obtaining further education - at an enormous cost to the taxpayer. Yet women work less years, for fewer hours, take more sick leave, take more 'time out' of the workforce and retire earlier than men. What are women's responsibilities here?

Did the author say well now I have a child so study is out of the question, I have to support my child? Somehow the author felt it was everybody else's responsibility to support her choices. So men have responsibility while women have 'choices' (read: entitlement).

What about her relationship and her decision to raise the child alone? Did she think she should compromise and make the relationship work for the good of the child? or Did she think now I have what I always wanted I don't need the encumbrance of a man. He can pay child support, I'll receive benefits from the government and I'll 'move on'. So if she is representative of the majority of relationship break-ups which are initiated by women (around 60% of divorces I think), then again it's a case of men's responsibility but women's entitlement.

It was such a mistake for men to believe that if women were treated as equals they would be responsible. We we dumb enough to take women at their word; to believe that if women said they wanted equality they actually wanted 'equality'. More silly us. We should have realised that women rarely say what they mean (when a man's partner asks if her bum looks big in something the last thing she wants to know is if her bum looks big).

We as a society just seem to find it so hard to ask women to take responsibility for their actions. Instead, it's been a case of the more accommodating men are, the more demanding women are.

Dear Saltpetre,

I am aware that your questions are addressed to Jardine, but there are a few points I just cannot leave unturned.

<<In tribal communities, of which we were all a part not so long ago...>>

The comparison is unfair: membership in tribal communities was voluntary. If you didn't like your tribe, you could just walk off, perhaps finding a different tribe or perhaps roaming the forest alone.

Societies on a national scale do not provide this option.

<<We have some who live outside the mainstream: homeless, street-kids, criminals, drug addicts; the 'hunters' who pray on others, and the 'gatherers' who rake the common refuse.>>

Yes, but why mention only the low-end margins below society, what about the high-end above society? what about hermits and holy-men (and women) who roam and bless the land without asking for anything in return?

<<Society has a responsibility to the children, irrespective of the 'sins' of the parents>>

Really? Even the children of Africa?

No, society is responsible for the children UNDER ITS CARE, not for just any children who never either placed themselves or were placed by their parents under its care.

If anyone here is interested, I wrote another post on this broad subject yesterday. (www.donaitkin.com)

It is complex and many-faceted. I feel that too any of the posts above see it is a simple question. It isn't, at all.

Dear Don,

What many single mothers did, the moment they heard about the new decree, was to desperately go out the street and ask the first man they see, "make me a baby please". That gives them another 8 years, which at the time seems forever, but in fact these too shall pass, eventually, leaving an even bigger hole in their purses.

Single mothers are not to blame, they are only the symptom. It is each and every one of us to blame who desires to be cared for when we are old, passing on the crisis with no concern as to who will care for the multitude of our resulting grandchildren once THEY grow old. Many of us already will have nothing to care for us when we are old but robots.

Yuyutsu
We agree that there is no moral right to government's claimed monopoly power over money. It’s just pure power, and used for systematic legalized fraud.

So there is no more justification to say, if you don’t like it you should leave society, than there is to say, if the statists doesn’t like it they should leave.

I'd like to see that!

Therefore you shouldn’t call on people who don’t consent to submit or live and die in exile from human society. Rather you should call for the abolition of government’s self-granted legal monopoly of pilfering the money supply.

Don
I went to your site and saw that post. It seems to me your approach suffers from the same fatal flaws as Petra’s and Saltpetre’s.

By casting the issue in terms of what “we” think, without ever defining who you mean by that, you seem to imply that the question is automatically a political one, and that the deciding entity should be the Australian government. But that is precisely what’s in issue, and you give no reason for it.

The contrary argument is that the whole thing is not a political problem and government should have no role in doing anything about it. Single motherhood is not some kind of mysterious affliction that strikes from the sky. Single mothers can work for a living like everyone else. There’s lots of work they could do. For starters, they could clean the houses, cook the dinner and look after the children of the people who are being forced to pay for them!

That way, when the taxpayers knock off work paying for the selfish greedy Petras of this world, instead of having to start work again shopping and cooking and cleaning, they could come home to a clean house and a cooked dinner. No need for a sole parents' pension, nor for taxation to that extent.

What would be unfair about that? All it requires is government to butt out of its discriminatory, unequal, self-contradictory interferences with people’s sexuality and freedom. You haven’t justified any more complex view.

Saltpetre
Never heard of a tribal society with a single parents’ pension, did you?

No.

A moment’s reflection would show why. It would immediately create two unequal classes: those who have the responsibility of make a living for themselves and looking after their own children, and finding a suitable partner, getting married and making their marriage work, at the same time supporting a minority and their children; with that minority feeling entitled to be supported by others for no reason, neither supporting themselves nor anyone else nor caring for anyone else’s children but their own.

It should be obvious that not everyone could be a member of the privileged class living at others’ expense. The arrangement is intrinsically unequal and discriminatory. And if it were not, and everyone had an equal right to do it and did it, it would immediately cause the total collapse of the economy and the society. It’s intrinsically selfish, greedy, and anti-social, not to mention childish.

And that would be to ignore its most significant flaw, which we can explore by asking this.

Why have you and the “whole of society” brigade defined society as meaning a group of people who comprise 22/7,000ths of the whole of actual human society?

(Australia’s population is 22 million, the world’s is 7 billion.) So your definition is grotesquely wrong, even if everyone in Australia agreed with you, which they obviously don’t.)

Why would anyone make such a gross factual and conceptual error, that is the question? (Don also made the same error.)

Why?

You don’t even know why you made that gross error, do you?

If you do know, please tell us why you did it.

Or kindly admit you don’t know why you did it, and I’ll explain why you’ve done it. In the process I’ll completely demolish your self-contradictory argument several times over.