Prostitution and Communism

[Ned]

Btw, did the commies ever contemplate simply declaring marriages null and void in the USSR?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by JohnT




You aren't allowing at all for the fact that many stay at home mothers, in fact, love what they do. And choose it. You'd rather force them to leave their kids to... pick up garbage, from what I gathered of your other statements.

Again, the womens movement was about choice. The choice to stay at home or the choice to work. The choice to have an abortion or the choice to have the baby. The situation you're talking about is a situation where women didn't have the choice and rebelled accordingly. But they didn't have the womens movement just because they didn't want to hang with their kids.

[Harovan]

No doubt, Sir Ralph, just at social security for the elderly decreases the incentive to have kids. Thus the population stagnation in "rich" welfare-state countries.

Ned, sadly you are perfectly right with that statement.

But it is a fallacy anyway, even though many may not see it. Social security for the elderly still is created by their offspring. Be it governmental subsidies for elderly (paid with taxes), interests or stock dividends, still their children work and pay for it. May be not by their personal children, but by the younger generation as a whole. And since we increasingly lack this younger generation in the developed countries, we are in trouble. Immigration can only partly solve it. More children can.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kidicious


(with the exception of the people here who will always disagree with ME no matter what I say).

hmmm while I usually disagree with you, I am not invariably opposed to you

Originally posted by Kidicious


Do you really think she earns that money? Most people would say no

Hmm the housewife works hard but if she worked more or harder, it would not increase the income/wealth of the family unit. So unless you create some artificial idea of a woman "earning " money from her husband, I agree that I can't see how she earns the money.

My question is so what? There is a certain amount of stuff that a given family unit may want or need to get done. Some of that is earning an adequate living to support the group but there are a bunch of other tasks that need doing. Why shouldn't pair of people be allowed to manage their own situation as they see fit. If someone wants to stay home with the children, its their choice. To say otherwise is condescending to legions of stay-at-home moms.

BTW-- our choice is that my wife works part-time. She enjoys the adult interaction and keeping her skills sharp and the income doesn't hurt. I actually love the days she works when I get our son all to myself-- any dad out there understands.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Marriage in a nutshell is an economical alliance to create the environment and social security to procreate and raise children. With the emancipation of women and their increasing integration in job and business, and with fiscal subsidies for single parents in many countries, it is increasingly losing its purpose already now, under capitalism. That's why in many developed countries the number of weddings per year is massively in the decline, despite temporary pikes.

Under communism, the economical need to create said alliance is gone and thus, marriage will most likely either vanish completely, or will transform more in the direction towards what cohabiting is today.

Interesting take but I just don't see marriage vanishing any time soon. On cohabitation, I don't see a huge difference as many cohabitants intermingle their lives to the same extent that married people do

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Ned
Btw, did the commies ever contemplate simply declaring marriages null and void in the USSR?

No, at the countrary, marriage was deemed very important.

This is not a contradiction, mind you that the USSR did not consider itself a communist country, but merely a socialist. The official doctrine was, that they were building communism (creating the economical basis, educating citizens etc. etc.), but even the most optimistic knew, that ideal communism would not be achieved in their lifetime by a long shot.

There were other silly attempts to try out features of communism nonetheless. At one point, basic food (= bread) was by law handed out without cost. Of course this attempt failed, because people started to feed animals with that cheap bread. A short time after, this wastage was cancelled by introducing a very moderate price for bread again. It did not cover cost to produce, however.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Flubber
Interesting take but I just don't see marriage vanishing any time soon. On cohabitation, I don't see a huge difference as many cohabitants intermingle their lives to the same extent that married people do

Well, I am theoretizing.

Neither do I see marriage vanishing, I just see a move from marriage towards cohabitation. But then, I don't see communism anytime soon, either.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Dracon II
Methinks the utilitarian value of good parenting (in the long run) is quite significant.

Agreed. The real value of parenting though is not the work, but how much love the child is given, and how qualified phycologically the parent is. It is a lot of work to raise children but people do it because they want to, which make it a different kind of work then going and doing work that you don't always want to get up in the morning and do.

Whether a mother does it unpaid, or a nanny does it paid... it is the same volume of work, with the same purpose.

The difference is that nannies only do it for money, but parents have chosen to do it for free.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger




link

When I was in the US, I frequently saw homeless people, many of them begged for scraps of food.

So unless this is a pathetic attempt at dismissing a widely known social problem, I have no idea what else you could be getting at.

I cannot deny your stats but my experience with homeless in calgary has left me somewhat jaded. Calgary and Alberta is experiencing an employmnet BOOM. Any warm body can get a job and a lot of the employers (construction) don't care where you slept or if you are particularly clean. yet day after day I see the same homeless folks on nearby street corners. They might qualify as "hungry" but yet they seem to have plenty of money for cigarettes. Feeding addictions seems more important than feeding themselves. I'm not even sure how hungry they are as there are several shelters in Calgary and my understanding is that they feed the number that comes through the door


Now -- don't get on your high horse saying " flubber is saying all homeless are addicts"-- I AM NOT saying that as it would be incorrect. But a significant portion of homeless here do suffer addictions and/or mental illness such that if you handed them a crisp $20 each and every day, there is no guarantee that they would eat well that day. More likely it would mean a mini-bender which would decrease the liklihood they would eat since the shelters generally bar the obviously intoxicated.

Now is the US experience a ton different? Here it seems that the more affluent Calgary gets and the better the shelters become, the more people you can see on the street.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
There were other silly attempts to try out features of communism nonetheless. At one point, basic food (= bread) was by law handed out without cost. Of course this attempt failed, because people started to feed animals with that cheap bread. A short time after, this wastage was cancelled by introducing a very moderate price for bread again. It did not cover cost to produce, however.

I don't see anything wrong with subsidizing bread (free is obviously a problem).

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kidicious


The difference is that nannies only do it for money, but parents have chosen to do it for free.

Obviously-- The same can be said for

mowing a lawn
finishing my basement
laying sod
have sex

etc etc.

All are things you can pay someone else to do or do yourself within your couple. What's your point?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Flubber
Now is the US experience a ton different?

Most of the begging for food, is just to get money to feed their addictions.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Kidicious


I don't see anything wrong with subsidizing bread (free is obviously a problem).

Not to threadjack but don't farmer supports/subsidies lead to grains being sold at prices that are inadequate to actually support the farmer? Doesn't this mean that food is in a very real way already subsidized? ( since without subsidies farmers would need a much higher price plus many farmers would exit the market)

Agree that giving anything free can be a problem. As soon as you give something "free", people value it less and will likely waste it

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Kidicious
I don't see anything wrong with subsidizing bread (free is obviously a problem).

But it didn't work, obviously. The full price for the bread still had to be paid, by adding extra charges or excises in luxury goods. People paid the price for cheap bread by having many luxuries unaffordable. A color TV in the GDR cost about 6,000 Marks, which equals the wage of about half a year for a worker. The cheapest car cost 10,000 Marks, and did not deserve to be called "car" at that. The cheapest real car was about 20,000 Marks.

Already the Romans knew, that you need bread and games to keep the people happy. Bread we had, and cheap one at that. However we lacked somewhat in the games sector .

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Flubber



Obviously-- The same can be said for

mowing a lawn
finishing my basement
laying sod
have sex

etc etc.

All are things you can pay someone else to do or do yourself within your couple. What's your point?

I don't know if all of those benefit society. I'll give you "mowing your lawn" though. Let's say you enjoy mowing your lawn and you planted grass just to mow your own lawn. That's not the same kind of work as having a job where you have to mow lawns all day long. Maybe you like to mow lawns you you have chosen that for a career, but you still have to do it all day long, and sometimes you won't want to go to work, but will have to anyway.