All The Wedding Bells And Tax Credits On Earth...

Jason Jordan strikes again:

Marriage, Class, and Causal Confusion | Jason Jordan: "Like these failed progressive accounts, all this talking up of marriage is just another confusion of causes with effects.

As with college education or home ownership, stable marriages are a marker of the middle class and the culture that makes it, not the cause thereof. The State can subsidize and incentivize marriage as much as it wants; the result won’t be any different than its disastrous schemes to subsidize college education or home ownership. Cum hoc is not propter hoc, and “tight connection” does not imply “root cause”…for all the reasons Mead should already know.

For a deep insight into the true “root cause” of poverty, don’t look to the wonkblogs and their endless graphs of statistically-convenient measures. Instead, search “Maury Povich paternity test” on youtube.

All the wedding bells and tax credits on Earth will not fix that. Like cheap student loans or sub-prime mortgages, they are nothing more than an ideological poultice loosely pasted over gaping wound."

Yes, now you know where my catchy (plagiarized) title came from ;) And this immediately evoked "Reynold's Law" with me:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Go RTWT. I'll wait.

Now that I re-read philo's piece, I realize where I didn't before that if you had to explain the interaction of grand illusion, "Gaslighting" and methodology with which the Delta masses are herded by their "betters" in a handful of paragraphs, philo may take the prize here.

But if you have some multiples of that to work with my current recommendation easily remains Jordan's piece from this past spring: "The Eye That Watches And The Hand That Feeds: A Requiem For The Revolutionary".  It begins thus:

Keynesian economic policy enjoys the singular advantage of assuring bureaucrats and politicians of their abiding importance, as well as calling for ever larger quantities of money to pass through their hands. Since Nixon’s famous admission, critics of Keynesianism have come to recognize this advantage as insuperable; and as no amount of reasoned argument can offset such incentives, they have resigned themselves to awaiting the inevitable end result of the terminal engorgement of the State. ...

If you have a morsel of a brain you already know you need to go RTWT immediately. I'll wait a little longer this time...

You'll finish it in sober awe. But you may not thank me since it will challenge your soul's foundation of optimism.

Which is why I think there are so many intuitively self-selected Delta ostrich escapists among a reasonably large subset of people who are smart enough not to be.

That and just watching what happens to people that step out of line.  You wouldn't want to be mentioned negatively in Teleprompter Jesus' next rant now would you?  Or audited by the IRS...