During high school, my “home away from home” was at the house of working-class family, a house so old that their ancient, monstrous furnace, consuming half the basement, had been converted first from coal to oil, and then from oil to gas. They raised five cheerful, self-reliant kids in 800 sq. ft., with bunkbeds and a big kitchen table. When not at his job as a railroad clerk, their dad was working in his garden. The mom was cooking, mending, volunteering at the church or reading. Come winter, the dad made extra income – and in time financed a lake-side house for their retirement – by carving very good hardwood plaques of wildlife scenes, which he then sold in local flea markets.

I still remember the Mare and the Bear (as their three comedic sons called them) drinking coffee at the kitchen table. The Bear was what we once called “a good man,” competent, responsible and incapable of lying. However, he didn’t have much patience for doing his own research, when it came to issues like where to put their savings or how to vote in the next election. The Mare, on the other hand, was the reader in the family, a smart and clear-sighted woman. She would talk to the bank managers and read the newspapers, and then they sat with their coffee (from an old, aluminum percolator), talking about what she found out. After a half-hour of back-and-forth, pros-and-cons, the Bear would decide how they’d handle things, and the Mare invariably ratified and respected his decision.

Now, it would be possible – maybe inevitable, today – to give a cynical interpretation about the Mare and Bear’s relationship. Some particularly bitter individualists might even condemn the Mare for not demanding more respect and recognition as the smarter of the two. But the fact is, the Mare and the Bear were a team. They loved each other and lived one life. And after all, “smart” isn’t the only virtue. The Mare was smart, so she saw the 60-40 or 55-45 arguments on both sides of a situation. The Bear was a good man, knew they had to decide something, and he would take responsibility for whatever they decided. They were a team. They complimented each other in ways that Post-Modern gender activists today refuse to see.

(Incidentally, Nature doesn’t care if gender activists’ stuff fingers in their ears, squeeze their eyes closed, and chant “la-la-la… I can’t hearrrrr you…” Nature has the last word.)

Now, when women first got the vote a hundred years ago, that initially gave an enhanced representation to teams like the Mare and the Bear. United couples would vote as a team for policies that, looking forward, should benefit their kids. Meanwhile, indifferent couples or the few singles might split their votes. There’s evidence of this in the personal income tax structure of the 1950’s. The average Baby Boom family had just over four kids. Couples filed joint returns, and households having four dependent children and an average income (about $5,000) would get enough deductions, so that they typically paid no income tax. Now, it may seem unfair to subsidize their “private choice” to have kids, but it was really subsidizing the next generation labor force.

It didn’t last, of course – not more than three generations. The Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration atomizes citizenship. The HUMA’s cultural impact dissolves families, neighborhoods and local loyalties – despite paying lip-service to democratic representation. We all become isolated little voters and sexual loners, having little influence on the Public Service. We may create or join a publicly subsidized dependent cohort – native, gender, elderly, racial, artistic, environmental, yadda, yadda, yadda – but then our only influence is to help bloat the already bloated bureaucracy.

Income earners — aka the wealth creators — have to come from somewhere, but the social welfare system forgot that.  The entire system supposed that seniors, the disabled and all the other dependent cohorts shouldn’t have to depend on the support of their own families — as if that were too humiliating. Instead, it would be much more respectable for them to live off the public dole. But going forward, all these public dependents would depend on somebody’s family – whoever was actually generating the wealth and paying into the public coffers into the next generation.

What’s more, the ten percent of the population under 85 I.Q., who use to live quiet and helpful lives in the room behind their family kitchen, they would now have to depend on day labor, bottle picking and social workers, to get a more independent and respectable room in “shared accommodations.”

Once the growing HUMA cut off its support for families, in order to subsidize the growing cohorts of public dependents, people stopped having children. By the mid-70s, the average fertility plunged from the Baby Boom’s four-point-something to under 1.8 per family, 10 percent under the replacement rate. So now the next generation labor force comes from immigration. And that’s a mugs game, because immigrant laborers slide more quickly into senior-citizen dependency. So the failure to subsidize families is a recipe for government debt.

The ideological father of deficit spending and Big Government, John Maynard Keynes, was once famously asked, “in the long run,” would not government debt simply spiral out of control? Would not governments always succumb to the temptation of deficit spending?  To this challenge, the childless economist famously replied, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Just kick that can down the road. Our kids and grandkids won’t be dead, however – supposing we have any – and they’re saddled with the debt, endemic inflation, punitive taxation, multiplying dependency classes, and an impervious Public Service.

There is a solution. Why stop political equality at males and females? That’s just bigoted ageism, discriminating against children simply because they’re filthy, absent-minded, noisy and their parents’ dependents. Kids have interests, too, only twenty years into the future. They are the wards of their parents, who have their best interests at heart and every reason to look twenty years into the future. Surely, if their parents can be trusted to raise them — yes? — then their parents can be trusted to vote in their best interest. They may certainly be trusted more than social workers or the teachers union. Any problems are all easily solved. The Administration already knows who’s their primary care-giver, so only one parent need go into the polling booth with their proxy ballots.

RAISE THE CRY! VOTES FOR KIDS! VOTES FOR KIDS!

Honestly, parents are the only people with any real interest in pruning back the overgrown Public Service. If the Mare had gone into the polling booth with her and her children’s six votes, we wouldn’t now be wrestling with a malignant HUMA.