Monday, January 29, 2007

Very Nuclear Family

Sorry if posts seem even more incoherent than usual, but I’m still coming to terms with being a family man. I mean, I’m still single with no kids, but after reading this post from Iain Dale, I realise that’s no reason to feel left out. After all, if we accept the Dale hypothesis that a family is just whatever random group of individuals happen to be occupying the same post code at the same time, well, I see no reason why people should be allowed to discriminate against monocentric family groups. After all, if critics are going to claim that single people can’t be a family just because a family needs to consist of more than one person, I have one word for them: schizophrenia.

But seriously, don’t think I’m criticising Dale’s post here. It strikes me as at least 1000% more honest than anything from his slippery ‘everything’s special’ leader. The only problem is that Dale doesn’t follow his own logic through to its natural conclusion. As Joe Single, I can see a case for paying relatively over the odds tax-wise to help ensure the next generation get the best start in life, but once we move outside the traditional family structure, what’s the case for subsidising even the most dysfunctional arrangements ? Or, to put it another way, if all lifestyles are equal, how can anyone justify taxing some and subsiding others ?

More profoundly though, what’s with the claim that all lifestyles are equal anyway ? We know that’s not true. The data is in – and has been for ages – some family groups do dramatically better than others. In and of itself, that’s hardly a compelling case for government intervention, except if you’re the type of deranged statist who thinks the government should issue fat licences. Oops.

Hey, how come all types of food aren’t ‘special’ ? Why aren’t Tories claiming that there are many different kinds of ‘healthy’ ? After all, in both cases what we’re talking about here is statistics. There must be plenty of folks still eating a full English breakfast every day well into their 80s, so how come the Tories want to set up their own CID (Cheeseburger Investigation Division) to clamp down on unlicensed kebab dealers, while claiming that kids could be raised by wolves with no harm done ?

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