What Have We Done?

We exchanged a 1300 square foot studio apartment for a 300 square foot one bedroom. The lady wanted a one bedroom apartment: She thought they were nicer than studios. The men defer to their ladies' wishes. And we got sold a dump. We Believed In Women's Equality and Got Sold Working Couples. We went from single income households to two incomes, with no matching rise in the standard of living.

The introduction of women into the workforce did not raise the standard of living but reduced the value of wages.

To appreciate the mess we are in, recall the Sixties. Wages and benefits were based on men as breadwinners, and women as homemakers, in single-income households. Men had a right to high wages because they had wives to support: The men were empowered. But the corporations resent empowered working men, and determined to exploit the women's movement to break them. Feminism fitted the corporate agenda: that men had no special right to high wages. The corporate media backed Feminism. And the rest is herstory. The pheminists phucked the alpha males off the phace of the earth, and the runt males can't stop sniggering. Yippee for Pheminism!

The key to the situation is the single-income marriage, which has to be recognised as such. Always it was assumed in the definition of marriage as a union of husband and wife: which is only valid as an approximation to the breadwinner and homemaker arrangement. So we can either change the laws of marriage, which would be highly confrontational. Or we can opt for the practical approach: a homemaker allowance.

In all the discussion of gay marriage, it never gets mentioned that gay couples are only a minor theoretical problem. The great practical problem is working couples. The issue is not whether to extend spousal benefits to gay couples but how to cut them off to working couples. Working couples are the disaster not gay couples. Working couples mean wretched homes, abused children, neglected seniors, exploited women and marginalised men. In a word: peonage. That's the direction we're headed. And it's time we took stock of the situation.

Where Is The Money Coming From?

Generations X and Y take note. Cancel survivor's pensions for working spouses! Anyone with a job in their own right, with its pension, has no right to a second pension as a spouse. That is double-dipping! The worst example is government workers having cosmetic dentistry, and putting half the cost on their own dental plan, and the other half on their spouse's plan, to achieve 100% coverage on cosmetic dentistry. That's fraud! The principle is that anyone with a benefit in their own right cannot repeat the benefit in another's right. And the same applies to survivor's pensions for working spouses. Cancel them!

(And please do not suggest it is OK for working wives to keep their husbands' pensions because men can similarly have their wives' pensions. That is like saying you can cheat because I can cheat. Women live longer than men, and marry older men with greater incomes, so the net result is a massive illicit transfer amounting to a bribe. It's a corporate policy of paying women to scab.)

I met an Indian lady recently whose mum had suffered a stroke and had to be institutionalised. The daughter was devastated because she had a close relationship with her mother, and wanted to care for her, but couldn't manage financially; and no help was available. We as a society will spend $1000 a day on institutional care, but we can't arrange $1000 a month for the daughter to care for her mother. Money, money, money. Those are the values we need to examine.