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Welfare vs. the Family
Reading JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the multidimensional problems in the hollers, you wonder what should be done.
Because Vance was presumably already planning a political career when Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016 he is fairly restrained about “solutions”.
The way Vance tells the story his Mom had multiple male partners over the years. Vance would try to connect with each male partner, but it was all in vain because at some point his Mom would break up the relationship and go on to another. Then she got into drugs interspersed with rehab and finally ended up on heroin.
Just imagine what it would be like to grow up in an environment like that, what it would do to your “mental health” every day.
How did Vance avoid the fate of drink and drugs and joblessness? First he had his Mamaw — pronounced “ma’am-or” — his grandmother who provided a port in the storm. Then, somehow, he got through high school, and joined the Marines.
It was basic training that made him a man, where he learned discipline, responsibility, “giving it my all”. The big thing in basic training was pushing the recruits to their limit, and their discovery that they could do it.
So when Vance went to Ohio State on the GI Bill he had the skills and the training to succeed. Unlike a kid with a pregnant girl friend who worked with him at a tile factory and couldn’t even work an eight-hour shift without spending half the time in the bathroom.
And by the time he got into Yale Law School he had enough horse sense to realize that elite law school was about developing connections.
In Coming Apart Charles Murray writes that in the white lower class the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much. That’s The Science. But in Vance’s memoir you get to see the facts on the ground.
So it was a happy coincidence that I read a piece by black intellectual Colman Hughes interviewing Delano Squires, author of The Vanishing Black Family. No, the family didn’t vanish because slavery;
[there’s] census data showing black marriage rates stayed remarkably high for a full century after emancipation, only collapsing in the 1960s.
The culprit was twofold: welfare and feminism:
the explosion of welfare spending, which effectively displaced fathers as providers, and the rise of second-wave feminism, which [Squires] argues convinced a generation of women that marriage was confinement rather than partnership.
I understood this 20 years ago from reading George Gilder:
Young girls know that if they get pregnant and have a baby, “they will get a flat.” So single motherhood is an opportunity. In the United States, the sixteenth birthday of a young woman, the day she could qualify for a government-subsidized apartment, was called “liberation day,” according to George Gilder in Men and Marriage. It was the day she could get liberation from the chaotic household of her mother and the dangerous young men there and get her own place, and her own baby.
In the lower class, I reckon, life is about getting by. If that means a girl gotta find a guy that will be a good provider and husband, then so be it. But if she can solve her problems by going on welfare, what’s not to like!
Then there are the feminists: let’s just boil it down to careers and no-fault divorce and abortion on demand.
Let me just gently suggest that women haven’t really been “liberated” by careers, divorce on demand and abortion.
Why do I say that? Because I believe that women were put on this Earth to have children and keep them alive, and men were put on this Earth to protect and provide for the mother of their children. Else doth err.
Your mileage may vary.
We have welfare because liberals did it. We have feminism because liberals did it.
Could we ever get liberals to change their minds? Probably not, because liberals know they have saved the poor with government benefits, and they know they have liberated women with abortion and no-fault divorce.
They know, and they have amassed a lot of political power dishing out the bennies to welfare recipients and liberated women.
And now liberals all over the world are busy inducting “migrants” into the wonders of government benefits. When you think about it, you realize that migrants on welfare ain’t gonna end well.
Is there an answer to these problems? Maybe the answer is basic training of the kind offered by the Marines.
Young men could be taught discipline, responsibility, and “giving it my all”.
Young women could be taught… Yes, what should we teach young women, so that they can have wonderful marriages and great families. Somehow, I think that teaching young women how to be girl bosses and how to complain about being “unsafe” doesn’t really help them.
| Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:09:52 GMT |
No Society is “Individualistic”
There’s piece in American Greatness titled “Individualism Versus Collectivism.” And I say that we racist-sexist-homophobes don’t want to use those terms.
Stu Cvrk naturally doesn’t like “collectivism”. He quotes an academic definition as “prioritization of the group over self.” But apparently “individualism” is OK.
[It is] “habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant” and “a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.”
Guess what. The term “individualism” was coined by rightist Joseph de Maistre as a pejorative to describe the French Revolution. And then lefty followers of Saint-Simon used the term “to criticize what they saw as the selfish atomization of society”. And of course today I would say that the term is mostly used as a pejorative meaning something close to anti-social.
I think the two terms, “individualism” and “collectivism” are presently used by our educated-class lords to marginalize anyone that doesn’t agree with their big-government Dictatorship of the Educated Class.
We humans are social animals. Every human is a member of a “collective”, a collection of humans that benefit from their interactions and cooperations.
The factor that differentiates societies, one from another, is the amount of coercion and force.
Some people think that humans can create societies without force and without property. Think of the 19th century communes like The Shakers, the Oneida Community, and of course, the Israeli kibbutzim.
But they are wrong. Communes don’t work. Every human community needs force, and every human community needs property. If you don’t have property you have force on the scale of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castroite Cuba. If you don’t have force you get layabouts like Bernie Sanders who visited a hippie commune and just engaged in political debates instead of helping with the work.
But humans have always been tempted by the idea that there exists a perfect society of perfect equality and perfect harmony and everyone pitching in to help. That’s what the Rousseaus of the world imagined.
What is a better word than “individualism” to describe a society that believes in the maximum of voluntary cooperation and the minimum of coercion? I asked Google and Grok to “describe a society that maximizes cooperation and minimizes coercion.” Hoo boy, you should see the difference!
The only word I can think of is “voluntaristic”. That would describe this:
People cooperate when property is secure, contracts are enforceable, reputation travels, exit is cheap, and the gains from trade are large relative to the gains from predation.
Looking at Björn Merker, he writes about “the ethics of reciprocity.” So maybe the word we are looking for is “reciprocal” society. Although I think it would be a society that combines his three moralities that I have renamed: altruistic, prudential, and trust.
But really, neither “voluntaristic” or “reciprocal” gives out the vibe that we need to replace the word “individualistic.” Ideally, the word would be “socialistic” but that word has been taken and ruined to represent a society of political domination and hegemony, a few steps short of “communistic”, meaning a society driven solely by political coercion.
And the fact that we do not have a word that encapsulates the best society, based on the story so far, is a problem.
In fact: Houston We Have a Problem. Today we have a society that has utterly transformed human life for the better, increasing per-capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years, liberating women and slaves, and we don’t have a name for it.
Grok came up with “libermarketism” but that doesn’t quite do it for me.
| Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:05:13 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
If you give politicians more power in an emergency, they will create more emergencies to get more power. — Douglas McKinnon
In socialism, everybody takes as much as they can. In capitalism, everybody contributes as much as they can.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
