My Musing Space: Are childless people penalized by family-friendly policies?

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Are childless people penalized by family-friendly policies?

While coasting around, I found another musing webpage,
"Jerry's Musings", about overpopulation on Earth, and the desirability of remaing childless. And he is arguing it here in Canada, in a country where without immigration we would have negative population growth. See the forecasts of Statistics Canada.
Although we are still in a growth phase globally, by observing social behaviour in developed and developing countries, we notice that as people are able to aquire more and more "toys", and I don't mean only objects but also such things as the ability to spend more on travel and other amusements, they become ever more reluctant to give that up for the selfish chore of child-rearing. This is already clearly observable all over in the developed countries and, while obviously I will not live long anough to see it happen, I predict that as living standards will improve worldwide in the near future, at a given point the opposite (negative growth) will become the problem.

Jerry's "No Kidding" social club would like us to believe that they are doing a favour to society by not having children. They even have the gall to question society's favouring those families who are ready to undertake that task. They ask: "How dare people with children ask for time off at work? How come childless people don't have the right to ask for time off for, say, joining a recreational voleyball team? How come childless people have to pay the same or more taxes while not using the facilities that those taxes pay for?"

Well, I see it this way. I, a postgrad, with an impressive job, decided at one point to take my family's affairs in my hand and left work for good. This way I vacated a nice position for someone, possibly someone without children. Instead I struggled with unpaid housework, raised two boys, cared for as long as I could for my mother who was dying of cancer, cared for my grandmother until she was almost 100, and now I take care of my octogenarian mother-in-law. All this while I have been saving the country huge sums in each of these cases simply by not putting these people into institutionalized care. And what will happen when I retire? I will not get the comfy pension that my childless working colleagues will get. I will only get social security pension, the very same that my esteemed colleagues will also get on top of their private pensions. And who pays for those state pensions? They are financed by the taxes of the working next generation, MY SONS...! Do you still think society is treating the childless unfairly?

I have one last beef with the Jerries of the western world. As a matter of fact I personally would prefer if Jerry and the other NoKidding members changed their minds and decided to bring children into this world, because I would much rather see the world be (over-)populated by them, then by those Middle Eastern mothers whose expressed goal is to produce a lot of children to a) eventually tip the balance of the world population in favour of the Muslimiyye
(see clip #1121 - a televised speech of Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi on the inevitability of Muslims flooding the western world), and b) to have enough children to be able to sacrifice a few of them for the glory of Allah as suicide bombers (see clip #1134 - a discussion on Syrian TV by Arab intellectuals about jihad, praising Muslim mothers for producing a lot of children and raising them to be prepared for martyrdom).

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