A Thought About Abortion As A Strategy
Republicans Don't Misread the Public, But They Are Clumsy
Was chatting with a friend of mine about some goings-on in the country. We are amazed at the brazenness of the looters in places like Chicago and San Francisco. Of course today I was told by the Bay Area Reporter on Race and Social Justice that using the word looting is racist. I have an abbreviated response, GFY.
I joked with my friend Nicole that I needed a personal looting concierge. Preferably one that could find tasteful things in my size, and return them if I didn’t want them.
It’s clear our civil society is breaking down in places. This was over the weekend in Chicago. This is Logan Square. Another friend’s son was carjacked in Lincoln Park. He was in an Uber. There was another shooting in River North not too far from where my daughter lives.
63 people have been shot in the ritzy Near North Side of Chicago this year. 42 were shot last year, and 33 in 2019. The violence was a compelling reason for me to move.
Other big cities are no different.
My old high school friend who is no conservative penned a longish piece of the way he is looking at the world today. He lives in the Bay Area.
Given this huge upheaval in civilized society, a lot of younger people are starting to make the decision to not have children or to get sterilized so they can’t have children. They are like modern-day Shakers. If you don’t know who the Shakers were, they were a religious cult in Ohio that didn’t have children. Eventually, demographics caught up with them and the cult died out. All that remains is the simple “Shaker furniture” and “Shaker style” which goes in and out of fashion.
Republican-led and controlled states should have an incentive to solve these problems. It’s not as if they are ever going to get the public union vote and other voting groups who don’t ever vote for them. However, often they have been too clumsy in formulating legislation to overcome the problem. Issues like abortion are like candy to them. They just can’t ignore them and get to the real cause.
It’s easy to identify the problem. It’s harder to come up with solutions. The quick and dirty solution is to enforce the law and punish the wrongdoers. However, it goes a lot deeper than that.
Look at these problems with a different lens. Decisions that people make are made logically. People are rational even though many times they don’t appear to be acting that way. They total up the cost and opportunity costs of action and act accordingly. For the looters, the opportunity costs are lower than the costs of stealing and fencing the goods to make money. Hence, they loot.
Why do people do this?
There are a lot of reasons, but one reason is they don’t have any hope. Their lives seem hopeless. They often don’t have a family group to lean on. They don’t have any support or incentive to make the right choices for their lives.
I think that hopelessness and a desire for family and love are at the root of a lot of problems we have in America. The “American Family” has broken down. Many have tried to twist what “family” really is to fulfill their own political means. What the twisted version of a family really boils down to a “tribe” and tribes are not families.
How many kids are born out of wedlock in the United States today? 40% of all live births in the US are to unmarried women. Broken down by race, it looks like this.
Blacks 69.4 percent
American Indians/Alaska Natives 68.2 percent
Native Hawaiians/Other Pacific Islanders 50.4 percent
Hispanics, 51.8 percent
Whites, 28.2 percent
Asian Americans 11.7 percent
When we look at the other side of live births, abortion, we find women of lower socioeconomic status and women of Color in the United States have higher rates of abortion than women of higher socioeconomic status and White women.
What’s really troubling is that the rate of change in single babies born out of wedlock is happening in white women under the age of 25.
We know from empirical data that kids who graduate from high school do better. If you graduate from college, you do even better. If you grow up in a two-parent family you do better than if you grow up in a one-parent family.
That leads us to policies in overwhelmingly blue states that have very very loose and lenient abortion laws all the way to states like Texas and Mississippi which have very restrictive abortion laws.
I think both kinds of states are making a mistake, and legislating on the end result of a problem rather than trying to change the costs/opportunity costs that lead to the problem.
If we agree with the results of the study that women who have higher socioeconomic status regardless of race get fewer abortions, shouldn’t people who are pro-life and pro-choice be able to agree that we ought to put in place policies that make it more probable and encourage people to achieve higher socioeconomic status?
I have never met too many pro-choice people that champion all abortions. Usually, they agree that abortion is not the first option and is the last resort in a situation that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
That’s why when I look at states like Texas and Mississippi, I wonder why they don’t have policies that encourage, and fund school choice. If a person gets a better education, and has access to better education, the data shows that they do a lot better than people who don’t have educations. They raise their socioeconomic status.
Access to education changes lives, and I mean real education. I don’t mean government-run and unionized schools that sap hope and destroy lives. I mean free and unfettered school choice where the money follows the family, not the bureaucracy.
Why aren’t states, and the federal government, putting in place policies that encourage people to make decisions that form families? Currently, tax policy and entitlement policy are full of measures that cause people to weigh the economic costs and choose a single-parent family over a dual-parent family. It’s far far more than family leave policy which is simply a politicized panacea.
The other thing each side does is clog courts with legal cases. It is tit for tat and that causes a decision by a judge to have far-ranging implications and other unintended consequences that cause both sides to simply resume the battle. There is no end to it.
The way to end it is not in the courthouse. The way to end it is to create situations where people have incentives to make different decisions.
By the way, no government program or government handout or entitlement has worked to change socioeconomic status. Ever. So don’t look to start new programs, or institute new taxes to pay for more entitlements. We’d be better off trimming and ending many of the ones that have been started since 1933.
Being raised in a married-couple household led the poverty rate for black children to go down 73 percent compared to mother-only households and 67 percent compared to father-only households. And as evidence of the power of family structure to transcend race, 31 percent of white children raised in mother-only households live in poverty, versus just 12 percent of black children living with their married parents. That is a stunning realization.
Hence, if you want to “cure” the abortion and other societal problems we have, don’t legislate on the end problem. Figure out the root cause, and change the economic choices by changing the opportunity costs.
Catchy title. Jim's piece stole the show, some amazing brain power to put that one together. He may not label himself conservative, but he is. But I do hope that he's a liberal and not ostracized by his tribe -- and that he brings some fresh thought to the liberal table that (maybe) can sink in.
True, I think, that a lot of people have a sense of hopelessness or at least narrowing horizons, and by no means is this limited to the lowest socioeconomic levels or to ethnic minorities. Caused to a significant extent by the hysteria over Climate/Environment and also by the endless propaganda about America as a horrible country inhabited by mostly-horrible people...but also by perceptions about career options and economic mobility. See my post Job Without Workers, especially the comment thread:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/66893.html
also linked at Instapundit, where there are quite a few comments:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/487779/