The latest “feminist” movement is to get the government to pay women to stay at home with their kids and caretake for older adults. (See, NYT essay.) The basic argument:
The feminist argument for a U.B.I. [Universal Basic Income] is that it’s a way to reimburse mothers and other caregivers for the heavy lifting they now do free of charge. Roughly one-fifth of Americans have children 18 or under. Many also attend to ill or elderly relatives. They perform these labors out of love or a sense of duty, but still, at some point during the diaper-changing or bedpan cleaning, they have to wonder why their efforts aren’t seen as “work.” They may even ask why they have to pay for the privilege of doing it, by cutting back on their hours or quitting jobs to stay home.
For eff’s sake. Let’s talk about basic economics and family structure.
You get paid for “work” because someone would rather you do those things at the office than have the money they pay you. It is not a reflection on your self-worth, contributions to making the world a better place, or anything but the fact that you are performing labour that someone would give up money to have performed. When we pay people to scoop ice cream, mow our lawns, or change the oil, it’s not because we are saying that scooping ice cream is more worthwhile than singing your child to sleep; it’s because we need the oil changed. This is not a way to advance cosmic justice or give people the warm fuzzies; it’s about (pardon the language) getting shit done that needs to get done, which you cannot or do not want to do yourself.
The important thing in all that is the person who pays the money gets something in return – an ice cream cone, a functioning automobile, or a lawn that does not resemble Einstein’s hair. You figuring out how to make your household work is not anything that benefits anyone outside the household, which is why no one pays you for it. If you want to get paid for raising kids or the cleaning the house, raise someone else’s kids or clean someone else’s house, and have that ‘someone else’ give you a check in exchange. But your kids, your house? It’s called being an adult.
(Incidentally, we already pay people to have kids: child tax credits, maternity care that is included in all health insurance premiums, free public schools for 13 years, subsidised state universities, after-school programmes, youth sports leagues. We also pay people who are old through Medicare, Medicaid, Elder Services, and heaven only knows what else. Let’s not pretend that women are doing the lion’s share of the work already that needs to be shifted even more to the taxpayer.)
Now, actual feminists have a good solution to this problem about not getting paid for “women’s work:” it’s called equally sharing their husband’s paychecks, or, in the case of elderly relatives, having a sit-down conversation with their siblings and saying, “Look, it’s going to cost $X in either foregone salary for me, or $Y to pay someone else to do this, to take care of Dad. Either come up with better ideas or open up your checkbooks, because this one isn’t falling all on me.” Sad, pathetic excuses for adults look to strangers to make their households function properly.
Readers, am I being harsh, or is this beyond absurd?
The Fog of Law 