Population and Affordable Family Formation

I remember reading in James Michener's Texas about a young German from some little principality or another who went to the local count or duke or something, and asked for permission to marry.  "No" was the answer because there wasn't a spare house for them to live in.  So he immigrated to Texas. In that case, a family didn't come into existence because of a direct government ruling. In the case of the United States today the prohibition is indirect, but just about as rigid.  This is complicated, because it's not about the population in general, but about the middle class. The middle class in America is big. It reaches from businessmen and other entrepreneurs to most of the working class.  The basis of the middle class is work and prudence.  Work to produce wealth, and prudence to manage it. Our fearless leaders have been in the business of taking as much of that wealth as possible away from the middle class to finance their grandiose utopian schemes for several generations now.  So the prosperous middle class is that much less prosperous.  Then the prudence kicks in.  Traditionally, we responsible burgher types don't marry and have children until we're sure we can support a family — Hence, middle-class prosperity. Since we're less prosperous, and the government has managed to make just about every necessity more expensive for the middle class, we marry later, if at all, and have fewer kids, or maybe not any till it's too late.  So the numbers of the members of the middle class dwindle. The flip side of this is the population explosion, relatively, of the non-middle class types, who are much less future-oriented and less responsible in most every way (that's why they're poor, get it?).  In other words, they get married if they feel like it, and have kids when it happens, no big deal.  And, added to their natural drive to reproduce imprudently, is the perverse fact that the government rushes in to subsidize them in every way — housing, food stamps, education, welfare, etc. etc. — using the money that it's ripped off from the middle class.

We've all heard the stories.  I heard a guy on the radio the other day, who knew someone who managed subsidized housing, and the manager said that, although taxpayers were subsidizing the daylights out of the rent, the beneficiaries considered it their due, and denied themselves nothing.  Big-screen TV's in every apartment, he said.  Natch, there are people who don't get subsidized who don't buy big-screen TV's because they don't feel they can afford them, what with their boring middle-class morality and all. The guy didn't say, but I'll bet those hedonistic apartment-dwellers don't hesitate to have all the kids they want (the checks increase when you do!), and maybe even, in extreme cases, get married.

This is just a hint of the problem.  I didn't come up with the term "affordable family formation" — Steve Sailer did. He's thought and written a lot about it, and if you want a deeper understanding of it, I refer you to him.  In his latest post on the subject, he compares the middle-class concept of marriage and family to the blithe free spirit of Obama's Julia.  Read it HERE.