• Government dropping DPB work rule

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

The National government had planned to get beneficiaries (welfare recipients) on the Domestic Purposes Benefit to work part time when their youngest child turned six. In earlier posts I said that this idea would backfire and it placed homeschooling beneficiaries in grave danger of having to send their children to the state brainwashing camps called state schools.

Now the government has dropped the plan, for a daft reason:

…yesterday Social Development Minister Paula Bennett confirmed it was on the backburner because people were being made redundant and jobs were in short supply.

I believe that this is a good move, for two reasons:

• as I said in my earlier post, beneficiaries would have just had more children to to avoid the work rule, resulting in more fatherless children, more life-long problems for those children, more crime, more costs for taxpayers, and more multigenerational welfare dependency
• those beneficiaries who wish to homeschool will be free to do so. Not only will those children be free of state indoctrination, but it is reasonable to assume that the sort of parents willing to do the hard yards of homeschooling are less likely to raise future beneficiaries

Why do I agree with this move when I believe that the state should not provide welfare? Because the DPB work rule would have simply increased the number of people dependent on welfare: dropping the rule is the lesser of the evils.

Related posts:

• Paula Bennett claims ownership of all New Zealand children

• A biblical perspective on home schooling and state schooling

What do you think about the dropping of the work rule?

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• Deborah Coddington on the Invalid’s Benefit: a critique

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

In the first version of this post I said that Coddington had made an error. Lindsay Mitchell pointed out that it was I who had made an error and not Coddington: the substantive difference was one word, but it was an error none the less. I would like to thank Mitchell for pointing out this error and apologise to Coddington.

In her latest column Deborah Coddington said in regard to the Invalid’s Benefit:

We need to get judgemental. Forty years ago, anyone applying for a benefit had to be “of good moral character and sober habits”. Another rule, since abolished, stated that “incapacity for work was not self-induced or in any way brought about with a view to qualifying for an invalid’s benefit.”

What Coddington does not say is that a similar but significantly more relaxed version of the rule is in force today. S40(5) of the Social Security Act says:

A person must not be granted an invalid’s benefit if the chief executive is satisfied that the person’s restricted capacity for work, or total blindness, was self-inflicted and brought about by the person with a view to qualifying for a benefit.

Coddington also criticises the woman who is receiving the invalid’s benefit and had to be restrained by four policeman. I do not wish to defend this particular woman, for I do not know her, but it is speciousness to say that someone should not be on the invalids benefit because they have to be restrained by four policemen. Many disabilities are invisible, and some disabilities such as psychotic illness and intellectual disability make people stronger, whilst also raising their pain threshold and thereby making restraint more difficult.

Coddington’s reference to the woman’s “gut hanging out over her jeans” is completely irrelevant and is a somewhat dirty tactic. Plenty of people who aren’t on the invalid’s benefit have their gut hanging over their jeans.

I am in broad agreement with Coddington when she says that many people who are on the invalid’s benefit should not be (I am paraphrasing), and I believe that the state has no business being involved in welfare.

What do you think about Coddington’s column?

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• How to deal with child abuse: Part 2

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

Click here for Part 1

In Part 1 I showed that an abusive parent commits a crime against a child and this is no business of the state’s, yet the state interferes in this matter because both Left and Right believe that only the state can resolve conflict in society. Now for my four part plan for dealing with child abuse:

1) End all state interference in child abuse

As I said, conflict between individuals is no business of the state’s. Furthermore, state interference in child abuse almost always brings evil, and the state will adjust its definition of “child abuse” to whatever will allow it to steal children (for examples click here and here. For an egregious example of state theft of children click here).

Consider this: if the state cannot run a business successfully why would we trust it to care for children? A tiny minority of children are better off in state care rather than parental care, but they would almost certainly do better in private care. Going to a public hospital may save your life, but you’ll always be better off in an equivalent private hospital.

2) End the welfare system that leads to child abuse

It is not universally true but it is largely true that child abuse is committed by welfare recipients. Why is this? Our welfare system – the DPB/Domestic Purposes Benefit in particular – pays people to have children. Economists have a saying: don’t subsidise something unless you want more of it. There are multiple problems with subsidising babies:

• the sort of people who could do everyone a favour by never having children find the idea of bearing children for reward attractive
• universal welfare encourages a selfish sense of entitlement, and a person with a selfish sense of entitlement is more likely to take what they desire – be that sexual pleasure or anything else – by force without consideration for the harm that this does to other people
• children become disposable commodities (i.e. meal tickets {they attract welfare benefits} and housing tickets {they attract state housing}) which do not cost their owners anything. If your ticket dies you can just pop out another one
• the welfare system encourages lazy, shiftless people to have children. Lazy, shiftless people resent children because children are hard work, and they sometimes vent their resentment against those children
• the welfare system pays people to sit around and take alcohol and other drugs all day: common sense indicates that more abuse occurs when an adult is under the influence of chemicals
• history clearly shows that the DPB encourages teenage girls to get pregnant, and a good number of those teenage girls then get boyfriends who abuse children

3) Allow individuals and private charities to deal with child abuse

To go back to the example I used in Part 1, if I punch you on the nose I have committed a crime against you. Furthermore, if a passerby sees me punch you he has the right to defend you. Likewise, if I see a child being assaulted I have the right to defend that child. The right to defend those who are under assault is the broad basis of my proposal for dealing with child abuse*.

How might charities help? Kiwiblog recently mentioned a 14 year old who was four months pregnant and driving with a blood alcohol level five times the limit. The mother is almost certainly a smoker, fetal alcohol syndrome is likely, and the baby probably doesn’t have a great future. If there was no welfare and no taxpayer-funded abortions that kid would probably have some serious problems ahead. But a charity could step in and offer accommodation until birth and adoption of the child, conditional upon sobriety (for the good of the baby). This would solve the girl’s problems and bring a better life for the baby.

Remember that a genuinely free society would bring checks and balances to such a system, i.e. if an abuser believed that I wrongfully intervened when I protected his children then he could take me to court over it. This is difficult to imagine for people who have never known true freedom from state interference, but the free market has a marvellous way of solving problems. Everyone acts out of self-interest and conflict in society inhibits the attainment of the desires of self-interest, so it is in the interests of everyone to resolve conflict. In other words capitalistic self-interest brings conflict resolution.

Classical liberalists do not propose an unobtainable utopia of altruism (we leave that to the Marxists), nor do we propose a conflict-free society. We simply believe that a society without state interference works better than a society with state interference. If you’ve spent time in a state hospital or you’ve had contact with CYF** you’ll know what I mean.

I do not pretend to have all the answers as regards how allowing individuals and private charities to deal with child abuse will work in practice, and I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

4) Remember that life isn’t fair

Lightning strikes people, people get thorns in their feet, and children get abused. Not every case of child abuse will be detected and/or fixed by any system. Too many people think that no one should ever suffer, and therefore state surveillance and control of parents is justified because it attempts to remove suffering from the lives of children. Suffering is bad but inevitable, and there will always be some children who are abused. Life is like a baby: sooner or later it produces some brown sticky stuff.

Read this before you get out the tar and feathers

• I am not proposing that welfare be stopped overnight. Universal welfare has so grossly altered and weakened our society that any means of dealing with it has to be gradual. The Libertarianz have some ideas worthy of consideration.
• I don’t want comments of the “You don’t care about abused children” variety, so I will make this perfectly clear: I do care about abused children, and I am simply proposing a different method of caring for them
• I know that children have previously been cruelly treated in private care, e.g. work houses and orphanages, however (1) that treatment may have been acceptable at the time and (2) usually the state was in a position to alter the care given but did not do so.

What do you think of the points that I have made here?

Do you have any practical ideas to add regarding how individuals and private charities might deal with child abuse?

Click here for Part 1

Some would say that making a kid wear a hat like this is child abuse

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* The state uses the same justification for defending children, but does so from a position of imposed authority and you do not have effective recourse against the state in the event of unjust actions by the state. If I defend a child that you are abusing I do so from a position of equality and you have means of effective recourse against me. It’s much like the difference between Mum sorting out a conflict between siblings and a sibling sorting out a conflict between siblings.

** Child, Youth and Family/Cruelty to Youth and Family/state social “service”

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Pure evil: social workers give children to gay couple for adoption despite wishes of grandparents

The Daily Mail is reporting that social workers destroyers in Edinburgh have given a five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister to a male homosexual couple for adoption, despite the children’s grandparents wishing to adopt them:

The couple, who cannot be named, wanted to give the five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister a loving home themselves. But they were ruled to be too old – at 46 and 59.

For two years they fought for their rights to care for the children, whose 26-year- old mother is a recovering heroin addict.

They agreed to an adoption only after they faced being financially crippled by legal bills.

The final blow came when they were told the children were going to a gay household, even though several heterosexual couples wanted them.

When the grandfather protested, he was told: ‘You can either accept it, and there’s a chance you’ll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.’ *

Then there’s the illness excuse:

But council social workers became worried that the grandparents’ ages and health problems meant they would also be unable to care for the children properly.

The 59-year-old grandfather, a farm worker, has angina while his wife is receiving medication for diabetes.

There are so many issue here that it’s hard to know where to start. I’ll confine myself to four points, based on the assumption that you don’t want to read a 10,000 word essay:

1) First and foremost: the state has no right to steal these children

By taking control of what happens to these children the state has stolen them. Even if the children were given to a heterosexual couple despite the grandparents wishing to adopt them I would describe that action as evil and totalitarian.

2) Children need and want stability

It would appear that those grandparents are the only stable thing in the lives of these children. Children who do not have stability are far more prone to mental health problems.

3) Children need one male parent and one female parent

In case you’re thinking that I’m just a fuddy-duddy christian I’ll quote two people who have commented on this case.

Melanie Philips says

The reason why adoption is so successful at raising healthy, well-adjusted children is that it replicates as far as possible the biological mother and father whose presence in the family is so crucial to the well-being of their children. * [She’s hit the nail on the head there]

The prevailing argument that all types of family are as good as each other as far as the children are concerned simply isn’t true. While some children emerge relatively unscathed from irregular households, children need to be brought up by the two people ‘who made me’ – or, in adoptive households, in a family which closely replicates that arrangement.

Where that does not happen, the child’s deepest sense of his or her identity as a human being is at some level damaged.

A child needs a mother and father because their roles in bringing that child up, and the way the child sees each of them, are not interchangeable. They are different and complementary, which is why if one of them is absent the child suffers, in many cases very badly indeed.

For very young children the absence of a mother, whose nurturing role cannot be replicated even by the most loving and attentive of fathers, is particularly tragic.

Therefore to say that depriving children of a mother figure is in their best interests – as the Edinburgh social workers have said – is clearly ridiculous.

Amanda Platell says

It appears that social services, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe that all relationships are equal when it comes to raising children. Indeed, in this case they seem to have decided that a gay relationship is preferable to a couple of opposite sex.

This is simply not true. They are not equal when it comes to the things children need most – commitment and stability. Yet is is regarded as heretical even to state the facts: which are that marriages last longer than cohabiting heterosexual relationships and they both last longer than gay relationships.

Those are the cold, bare truths. It is too soon to know the statistics on same-sex marriages as there has not been enough time to assess the trends and many same sex couples enjoy enduring and truly fulfilling relationships.

But if commitment and stability matter most to children’s happiness and success, the least suitable place for them to be raised is by a gay couple. That’s not homophobia, that’s not bigotry, that’s a fact – unpalatable as it might be to the Left consensus.

4) Social workers are hypocrites

Peter Harris of the Grandparents’ Association in the UK says

Lynn Chesterman, the Chief Executive of the Grandparents’ Association, and I have both, when talking to audiences of social workers, undertaken the following exercise.

We asked our audiences to say whether they would ask a family member, in particular a grandparent, to look after their children if they became incapable of doing so themselves. Almost universally they raised their hands in assent.

When asked whether they would prefer social services to do so – guess how many of their hands went up!

I’ll bet you a chocolate fish that they don’t put their hands up the second time because to do so would mark them as opponents of the liberal left/feminist agenda that is a loose in their departments like a fox among chickens. These two children are in the mouth of that fox.

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The traditional extended family structure is one that contains multiple layers of redundancy, e.g. if the parents of a child die in a car crash there are potentially four grandparents (and other relatives) able to step in: this is the most natural order of events. Indeed, before rest home care was common many grandparents lived with their families and earned their keep by caring for grandchildren and doing other jobs around the house. If anything happened to the parents the transition to care by the grandparents was easier for the child because they were already familiar with the grandparents (that’s stability, point 2 above). Yes, there were plenty of families with problems, but there were also plenty of families akin to what I have described; sadly this traditional family structure has largely disappeared in Western cultures.

Strong family units are essential to a healthy society, so totalitarian, politically correct and evil actions by social workers will only hasten the Left’s plan to destroy the foundations of our society.

What do you think about the state forcing these children to go to a gay couple against the wishes of their grandparents?

Click here for an update to this post.

Hat tip: Samuel Dennis

* emphasis added

Will National force homeschooling beneficiaries to go to work?

In an earlier post I wrote about National’s plan to force beneficiaries to find work once their children reach school age, and I showed how this ill-conceived idea will backfire.

I was concerned that beneficiaries who wished to homeschool might not be allowed to do so, so I emailed Paula Bennett, the new Minister of Social Development (Minister of Social Welfare in old-speak). Today I have received a letter from her which says in part:

This is a tricky situation for a classical liberalist. On one hand I am opposed to taxpayer-funded welfare, and on the other hand I am opposed to state education that indoctrinates children and undermines families.

On balance I believe that beneficiaries should be allowed to homeschool for the following reasons¹:

1) it’s better for the taxpayers: paying a benefit is cheaper than sending a child to school plus paying a partial benefit to a parent who is working part time².

2) a child that is homeschooled is more likely to benefit society than one who is schooled by the state, because a child who is taught well at home has better academic results, more maturity and is better when it comes to logic and independent thought. They do not turn into adults who continually grasp the mammaries of the nanny state³.

3) as I said in the post linked to above, the state uses schools to undermine families, and undermining families harms children as well as the rest of society.

4) the fundamental issue here is whether or not children of beneficiaries will be forced into state schools, and I believe that parents should be free to raise their children as they see fit and without the liberal left propaganda that is fed to children in schools …

As Bennett’s letter says, she is still considering whether or not to force the children of beneficiaries into state schools. I strongly urge you to make a stand for freedom and email her or write to her, stating that you wish to see an exemption to the work rule for beneficiaries who desire to homeschool⁴. It helps to give reasons for your belief, a paragraph will suffice.

Click here for Paula Bennett’s email form.

A stamp is not required for snail mail:

Hon Paula Bennett
Parliament Office
Private Bag 18888
Parliament Buildings
Wellington 6160

What are your thoughts regarding beneficiaries who wish to homeschool?

When you’ve written to Paula Bennett please post a copy of the letter in a comment or send a copy to me via the contact page.

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Click here for a biblical perspective on home schooling and state schooling.

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1) there is no perfect solution in our present society, so I am focusing on the lesser of the evils.

2) this statement is based upon a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

3) this statement is based upon my personal observations of children who are homeschooled.

4) The state is arrogant enough to police parents who homeschool via the Education Review Office, so beneficiaries won’t find that homeschooling is an easy way to avoid work.