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The Baby Boon by Elinor Burkett

The spirit I, that endlessly denies

all that comes to birth

is fit as nothing worth

the world is better sterilized

—Mephistopheles

Public policy is a tough place for the reason to be heard. Pundits start with conclusions, search for supporting evidence, then ignore counterarguments that would demolish the conclusions.

For the past few decades, the United States has quietly and often inadvertently operated on the theory that justice is a matter of balancing the claims of the wealthy, the childfree and the adult wards of the state. The duties to children belong to parents. The benefits from children belong to the Republic, the rich, the childfree and the dead beats.

Now comes Elinor Burkett. Little subtlety here. Baby Boon

argues that justice means balancing the claims of the

childfree with the rights of the adult unemployed wards of the state—”equality with need” is her glittering version—but the wards of the state are merely a rhetorical toy for Burkett. Her policies would not benefit the needy. Adults do not need dependency, nihilism and bad norms, but that does not stop Burkett.

Specifically, three elements comprise Burkett’s version of “justice”:

· First, a deontological element consisting of one major rule, or rather, wrecking ball—a biased, selective application of equal pay for equal work. It should more accurately be called equal pay for labor force work and big pay for the childfree for little work outside the labor force. What supports her rule other than Burkett’s will to power? See element number two.

· The second element: Emotivism. Intuitive feelings of resentment are her great truth teller. If one has resentment the targets of that resentment are the correct targets. Humans, however, have a long, ugly history of directing resentment at the wrong targets.

· Third, another deontological rule, or rather buzzword—”need”—plays a puny, manipulative role.

There are no other rights. The author’s rights can not be outweighed, or so it appears. Explicit moral absolutism has merely been replaced by rights absolutism-a form of moral absolutism that cleverly avoids negative implications of the word moral.

This book delivers many truths—the publisher, the copyright date, the author’s name. After that, fuhgetaboutit. Burkett argues that the United States of America is engaging in an unmitigated rip-off of the childfree. To prove her argument, she has assembled an impressive variety of small samples (anecdotes), bad statistics, ad hominem attacks, straw person attacks, emotive blather, false cause claims and false denial of cause claims. In fact, this book has more ad hominem and straw person attacks than any nonsatire I ever read.

Does all of that make it the worst book I ever read? Nope. It has almost no good points and the few it has are of minor value. Does that make it the worst. Yes, indeed.

She writes that “a nonparent earning as little as $10,000 a year receives a maximum Earned Income Tax Credit of $341—while an adult with a single child in that same income bracket can claim up to $2,210.” This is a cluster foul up.

First, Burkett thinks this is discrimination. Apparently, children do not count as human unless their parents are on welfare. Children are consumer toys, which is baloney. The moral benefit of the difference between $2,210 and $341 to the parent and child is much greater than it is to a single adult. Even with the credit, a parent and child are in worse economic shape. The number of individuals in a family makes a huge, relevant moral and economic difference, but not to Burkett. She does not budge a picometer.

The legitimate distinction the number of individuals involved in a family does not register to her. One adult can live a much better lifestyle on $10,341 than two people can live on $12,210. She does not mention any of the numerous economic advantages enjoyed by the childfree such as the fact that it is easy for the childfree to rent a single room at low cost or to spit apartment rent with other singles.

Any theory of justice that denies the fact that the existence of children creates a legitimate distinction between two families denies the humanity of children. Fascist and Marxist are two words for those types of theories. Boon is not quite eat the young, but it is close to throw the young and unborn overboard. Much of Boon is mixture of standard ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative fare. Burkett hides the truth about her vision behind vague pro-freedom, pro-democracy, anti-racism equality rhetoric that is the opposite of reality.

Second, I have no idea where these brackets came from. I

looked at the Earned Income Tax Credit tables for the past four years and could not find the brackets Burkett reports. Must be Burkett brackets.

Most of the statistics in Baby Boon are false, misleading, irrelevant, small samples, biased samples or some combination of these. Burkett writes that “one in ten of the nation’s children [is] being fed on thirty-five cents per day.” Unless, unbeknownst to me, children have begun to eat oxygen, this is the most obviously false statistic I have seen in months.

Judging from the credits, a large number of people helped Burkett with Baby Boon. How sheltered and clueless are these people to believe that statistic and all the other lies in this book? Did any of the advisors question any of Burkett’s premises or did they make suggestions but were overruled on the grounds that any manipulative rhetoric is good because it will help the cause? Apparently, the childfree have a will to believe that approaches that of the people who join cults.

“They have watched President William Jefferson Clinton and his Republican Congress forge the most massive redistribution of wealth since the war on poverty[.]” And what pray tell is that: “a massive middle-class tax break totaling more than $5 billion a year.”

First, Somebody should tell Ms. Burkett the size of the economy. Five billion dollars is not “massive.” Five billion dollars represents about 0.05 percent of GDP, about 0.2 percent of all annual government spending. The five billion dollar “monster” works out to a mean of about 70

dollars per child. Most children will not get that much. I am beginning wonder whether no more than one in 1000 people have an accurate macro view of what is going on in the world.

Second, I can think of dozens of policies that “redistributed” more wealth than that, most of them destructive “social engineering” that favored the rich, the childfree and various destructive groups. Changes in tax policy alone over the past fifty years redistributed trillions to the childfree, a change necessary no doubt for the proper care of tropical fish, flower gardens, video collections and Porches. Token pro-child policies are described as massive while policies that

have transferred trillions from parents and children to nonparents are ignored. If anyone wants a list policies that redistributed more wealth than that, send me $50 and I will send it to you. The new family friendly tokenism does not add up to five percent of the dozens of childfree friendly policies of the past two generations.

Third, a quick calculation in my head tells me that the actual number has to be at least two to three times five billion. I have no idea where she got the number five billion.

As for small samples, let’s see. There is Cheryl, Anna, Susan, Steve, Sandy, Erin, John, Alicia, a suburban couple from Boston and on and on ad pukeum. And if you drew conclusions from them, you might as well arrive at the

conclusion that one out of every eight Americans is named Anna. Even one of my relatives who knows little about logic said, “This sure has a lot of ‘antidokes’.”

Burkett’s version of American parents and children owes much to confirmation and availability biases. Delivering a small sample and unrepresentative sample together we get: “Leaving no room for the young women to dismiss her as anomalous,

Purnick punctuated her remarks with the stories of friends and colleagues[.]” Wow, friends and colleagues! I guess there is no room there, except for me to find a way to control my bladder.

In a world where trillions of dollars and billions of lives end up in all the wrong places she writes as if a few anecdotes about shirking parents were the most important argument in the world.

Equality to her means a narrow application of equal pay for equal work. Here is what the Burkett “moral” universe looks like for hypothetical persons A through G:

A: Childfree adult at Corporation X, works 2000 hours a year, earns $55,000, will collect $500,000 in retirement benefits courtesy of other peoples’ children. Conclusion: Victim of inequality and persons B and D.

B: Parent at Corporation X, works 1975 hours a year, misses 25 unpaid hours of work to care for children, works over a thousand more hours at home, earns $41,000, income is less than A because she in on a “mommy track” or lacks seniority

due to years spent in child care. Conclusion: Racist, fascist, sexist, greedy, inegalitarian shirker.

C: Dead-beat clerk at store Y, Total income: $16,000 a year, lives with parents, drives bitchin’ new Camaro, will collect $250,000 in future retirement benefits courtesy of other peoples’ children. Conclusion: Victim of inequality and persons B and D.

D: Parent with two children, clerk at store Y, Total income: $18,000 a year, misses two unpaid days to care for children, works over a thousand more hours at home, earns more than person C because of earned income tax credit, lives in

terrible neighborhood that has adopted norms of the local young nihilists, D’s kids go to terrible schools. Conclusion: Racist, sexist, fascist, greedy, inegalitarian shirker.

E: Childfree 57-year-old retired CEO, owns island in Caribbean, collects $48 million in tax sheltered retirement benefits provided by other people’s children. Conclusion: Victim of B and D and of colicky baby who crossed

his path on his way to Bloomindales.

F: Childfree Yogi on mountain top chanting the word equality the way other Yogis chant nonsense syllables. Conclusion: Source of wisdom.

G: Childfree instructor at Slug Brain University, teaches other

childfree adults false ideas about reason, morality and justice. Conclusion: Ready for canonization.

Burkett has it backward. It is time we stopped paying the childfree for not having children.

As for emotive blather, there is “disgust,” “bitterness,” “resentment,” “rigid female stereotypes” and the “feeling they’re getting the shaft.” According to Burkett, if a parent leaves work to take a sick child to the doctor, it is a source of colossal injustice, degradation, disrespect, bitterness, and attention starvation among the childfree.

Burkett makes much of how parents chose their circumstances, but the childfree are never faulted for their choices, especially their cockamamie resentment. You can almost picture tears of rage dripping from their chins.

Yet these same childfree folks have no problem with being paid twice as much based solely on seniority or collecting trillions in retirement benefits. If you get paid twice as much and get twice as much vacation for the same work, that is called seniority. If a parent misses an hour of work, that is an

“injustice.” If Burkett is right, and the childfree are so bitter and resentful over so little, might they not discriminate against parents when it comes time for promotion?

If Burkett is to be believed the childfree do have something in common with children: They are bigger whiners, wantons and emotionalists than a four-year-old.

Then there is the melodrama of discrimination, prejudice,

“insidious dangers,” “childhood apartheid,” “the dangers of a

society that promotes any one lifestyle, of exalting and rewarding one set of personal inclinations and decisions above all others.” She, of course, fails to notice that most of the rewarding of lifestyles has been going in the other direction. What a terrible thing it would be for the government

to reward contribution and good actions and not reward destructive actions. While Burkett busily accuses others of racism, somehow it escaped her notice that parents are disproportionately nonwhite. They are screwees in the Burkett vision.

According to Burkett, the straw person claims of parents and children are in cahoots with Marxists, socialists, sexists, racists, heterocentrists, Orwellians, tyrants and neoconservatives. Never mind that her vision of equality looks a lot like a mixture of Marxism, ultra-conservatism and so-called libertarianism. Judging by this book, the childfree regard working parents as worse people than Saddam Hussein, a man whom we keep rewarding. It is no surprise that Boon received praise from vacuous leftists, misanthropic ultra-conservatives (Florence King), and so-called libertarians (Virginia Postrel) alike. It should tell you something about neoconservatism and so-called libertarianism that they prefer Marxist, anti-meritarian, anti-consequentialist, anti-rights theft and hedonism over the free-market feminism of Shirley Burgraff.

It will be fascinating to see how this childfree movement plays out. The childfree already have almost every American political party on their side, and it has been that way for over a generation. Most anti-child ideologies do not to write explicit anti-family diatribes. They merely pursue their ideologies and quietly and blissfully let their policies do the damage. It will be hard for the childfree to combine explicit anti-parent, anti-child warfare with the kids first platitudes that are ever popular. Then again, by exploiting “need” it might be doable.

Here is a sample straw person: Frank Wolf wanted “to increase the dependent deduction to $3,500, although only for children. For some reason he chose not to articulate, adults

would have remained at just $2,050 [1990 personal exemption amount in 1990 dollars I think].” Let me try one charitable guess. Perhaps it was because adults in addition get the “standard” deduction. In 1999 it was $4,300 for singles, $6,350 for heads of households and $7,200 for married who filed jointly. The standard deduction for children is zip, zero, zilch. The standard deduction should be called the Childfree Cohabitating Adult Tax Relief Act. So much for equality. Standard deductions, personal exemptions and dependant deductions a bad policy, but that is another story.

Boon’s straw person attacks would not be complete without that favorite distortion, “solve all our problems.” I have never heard anyone say something would solve all our problems, yet the phrase persists.

Often Burkett serves up a puff-ball position, then rails against the contradictions within the straw person, including the “have it all” distortion.

According to Burkett, token pro-child measures that politicians trumpet merely to gain votes are “proposals and policies that violate every democratic principle fought for over the past two centuries[.]” If a country passes 100 policies that take from parents and one policy that rewards parents, few notice the policies that take from parents. People notice the policy that gives to parents and call it pandering.

Burkett’s vision of democracy is closer to the People’s Republic variety. Do I need to list even a handful of the evils that have been committed in the name of “equality?” Boon is the world where justice and fairness mean any assertion one can concoct. The great persuasive power of communism was in its ability to be a battering ram of rhetoric that was at colossal odds with the truth. The same goes for Baby Boon.

While this work has anecdotes-a-plenty of parents who cheat others, the questions that matter are missing. Merit? Consequences? Median incomes? Disposable incomes? Consumption patterns? How much do the childfree gain from parental investments? How much do parents gain from the investments of the childfree? How much should the creation of a new human and benefit to that human count? How are low income individuals doing? Burkett uses a common pattern: Support trivial claims with statistics (albeit bad statistics), deliver broad, major claims with no statistical support.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that between 1973 and 1990 (the last year I could find figures) the median annual earnings of heads of young families with children declined 44 percent. The drop was from $22,981 to $12,832 in 1990 dollars. Teen parenting is not the only cause. Seventy percent of under 30 families with children have a head of household age 25-29. Only three percent are headed by teens, with 27 percent headed by 20 to 24-year-olds. Declines due to increases in single parent families are outweighed by the increase in two income families. Amazingly, the Census Bureau reports that the median income of single householder men with minor children declined from $33,000 in 1976 to $23,000 in 1993 (the last year I found figures) in 1994 dollars. The Children’s Defense Fund notes: "Among the youngest households with children -- those headed by someone younger than 25 --fully 30 percent paid more than half their income for housing in 1993--three times the comparable proportion in 1973."

The median family income of families with minor children is $4,000 less than families without minor children despite the facts that families with minor children have twice as many individuals (four verses two) and work far more hours in the paid and unpaid work forces. Couples without minor children are by far the wealthiest family group in America. They have a mean disposable income six times the mean disposable income of families with children.

I wonder why Burkett did not mention any of this? Boon implies that it is fine for the childfree to use parents and children to serve their own economic interests, but parents and children who are concerned about economic justice are “crass.” Anyone whose moral reasoning has developed beyond that of a chipmunk should be insulted and angered by this book.

So what if the pundit class loves this book. Punchy prose replaces well-reasoned arguments. Most of them do not know jack about macroeconomics or family policy so counterarguments would even occur to them. The fact that this work will be popular among the pundit and entertainment classes is no argument in favor of it.

Why do the childfree need to organize? Too speed up the process? Most political parties and think tanks have been stealthily supporting anti-child, anti-parent policies for decades.

Burkett spends considerable space excoriating the middle class, which is what one should expect from a mixture of Marxism and so-called libertarianism. One thing Marxists, ultra-conservatives and libertarians agree on is that the middle classes are for milking and manipulating. If the Burkett’s of the world had their way, the middle class would be gutted, producing a sort of banana republic with no crying babies to interfere with the peace and quiet.

Burkett contrasts the plight of poor children with children who have excess junk. It is funny how the media constantly contrast children who have little with children who have lots. They are rarely contrasted with adults who have lots of luxuries.

According to Burkett, policies that benefit children are “social engineering” while engineering that benefits the childfree are what rights and democracy are all about. Funny, they did not call it social engineering when they decided that parents and children were responsible for the retirements of the childfree. They did not call it social engineering when they jacked up taxes on working class families with children. They did not call it social engineering when competent adults married and they both got health insurance from one of the adult’s employers. But children, who cannot fend for them selves, do not get health insurance if their parents lack health insurance. They did not call it social engineering when people with more seniority were permitted to get extra pay for doing the same exact job. Not coincidently, those with the least seniority happen disproportionately to be workers with young children.

They did not call it social engineering when individuals cannot decide the terms of their marriage contract. They do not call it social engineering to leave the unborn with trillions in debts. They do not call it social engineering when third parties, often children, have to pay the costs of automobiles. They do not call it social engineering when civilization is designed around the use and subsidization of adult toys. They do not call it social engineering when rich people have subsidized housing.

Almost all policies are “social engineering.” The question is whether policies are beneficial or harmful. If the issue this book wants to debate is whether nonparents are cheated, you would think the trillions of dollars adult children are legally required to turn over to nonparents would be an important part of that debate.

Burkett attempts a history lesson and a fallacious appeal to tradition by arguing that pro-child practices are a recent invention that, apparently, violate the natural order. Let’s just say there were historians in the former Soviet Union who wrote more accurate stuff than this. Burkett informs us that parents in the past were primarily worried about family name and tradition. I have a hard time believing people whose entire livelihood could be washed away in a storm or wiped out by a disease gave little thought about the economics of their families.

The only era I can think of that had miniscule family practices was the early years of The Great Depression. Prior to the 1930s children contributed work to families and provided for elderly parents. As Herbert Hoover receded from view, Social Security and various poorly targeted family policies were enacted.

Here is the tax history according to Robert Rector: The mean working family of four in 1948 paid three percent of their income in all federal taxes. By 1997 that number had increased to 24.7 percent. Throw in state, local and all other taxes, and they paid 38 percent of their income in taxes. The “massive” tax credit for children reduced the 24.7 federal percentage to 23.3.

We are evolving into a land where regardless of duties, resources and contributions, most people pay a similar percentage of income in taxes. Until 1950 payroll taxes were two percent. Now they are 15.3 percent. Between 1949 and 1989 the top income tax bracket dropped from 82 percent to 28 percent, before being increased to 39.6 percent for much of the 90s. Of course, by using tax shelters, the rich have rarely paid more than 40 percent and often nothing.

For decades, politicians adopted policies that made families with minor children pay more while we were saying we were accomplishing something else, then people react with shock and anger when anyone has the temerity to suggest that parents and children should get a better deal, as if it were a violation of the law of universal gravitation.

Like neoconservatives who constantly tell us how much better off the nonrich are now than the nonrich were in the past, she

tells us how much better off children are now than children in the past. And like neoconservatives who forget to tell us how much better off the rich are now than in the past, she somehow forgets to tell us how much better off the childfree are now than in past. The general improvement of children’s health over the past century is no argument that the childfree are being cheated. The health of almost all demographic groups has improved.

In the end Burkett’s equal pay for equal work sledgehammer, which is blind to distinctions, other rights, merit consequences and counterarguments, other than straw clowns, becomes merely a soporific exercise in ersatz justice.

Boon has mastered the art of persuasive punditry but has no clue when it comes to matters of truth and justice. Her equal pay for equal work slogan should in truth be called: More pay for less work and less benefit created.

Do not look for definitions. Burkett asserts that since there may be disagreement, there is no point to definitions. And since child policy is “controversial,” there is no point to that either, except of course the policies that harm parents and children and benefit the childfree. Apparently, all one has to do to get one’s way is claim that refusing to submit is too controversial. Get a new hairstyle? Sorry, too controversial. Reduce starvation? Too controversial.

It is impossible not to have child policies. It is like not having a foreign policy. Even if you have a completely isolationist policy, this is itself a policy with major consequences. Of course, the childfree idea of “no” policy means ignoring all the policies that benefit the childfree

Now that a small number of parents are starting to stand up for their rights, Burkett sees parents as both a tyrannous majority and an evil anti-democratic minority menace. It is difficult to imagine an argument with worse contradiction radar. Burkett’s contrarian ad populum attempts are exceedingly tiresome.

For the record, families with minor children are a minority of households. According to the 1998 General Social Survey, 38 percent of households have minor children and married couples with minor children make up 26 percent of households.

Parents rights equal greed that leads to a dystopian hell, or so says Burkett. The rights of the childfree equal absolute rules that can not be outweighed. Parents who for some strange reason suggest that they might have some rights are derided for taking “refuge in the final rhetorical device left to them.” Burkett claims to favor merit, but denigrates “desert” when her straw people parents use it to mean the same thing.

She claims that the pro-child policy experts have stifled dissent. Her claim of dissent stifled is about as believable as someone claiming the American Medical Association is about to by overthrown by tree surgeons. This is a remarkable stifling since I have almost never seen the pro-child experts in the popular media. I saw an article on Shirley Burgraff once in U.S. News and World Report, and that is about it. There is a copy of The War Against Parents (not a good book anyway) at my local bookstore, but it is relegated to the parenting technique section. The political science section if loaded with anti-parent, anti-child “experts” from neoclassical economists to postmodern sociologists.

Family policy is simply too boring for the stoned free. I am pretty sure you will not find the thought provoking True Security at your local bookstore. When I talk to people about family policy, most have no interest in the subject and most of the remainder are hostile. One pleasant thing about going to some college libraries and browsing the child policy section is that I can be fairly certain the library’s entire collection is on the shelves.

Apparently, “stifling” is the condition that exists when neoconservatives, ultra-liberals and so-called libertarians have not been able to control 100 percent of the limelight on 100 percent of the issues and a smidgen of disagreement breaks through.

If you want to talk about dissent stifled, try telling childfree retirees their benefits arise from terrible policy and reasoning. You will see a glut of anger and incomprehension. Why should a working family with minor children that has an income below the median pay huge chunks of their time and income to wealthy, childfree retirees?

In a humorous turn she puts the ad hominem “breeders” in quotations, perhaps to soften matters. I do not know why she bothered. She felt perfectly free to engage in numerous vicious ad hominem attacks. But Burkett assures us that “[n]o sane person would risk being branded a kid-hater in modern

America,” a claim that is either false or unflattering to Burkett. Amazingly, the ad hominem spewing Burkett also decides that the neutral term childless is a slur, and suggests that it be replaced with childfree, which is fine with me.

The tone of this book reminds me of a crone who used to pound on her window and wield her index finger when one of our childhood games strayed into her yard, except that now the childfree are bank thieves who have the temerity to bitch about the setting of the air conditioning at the bank. Reducing transfers to the childfree is not an incentive program. It is

a matter of merit and benefiting humans.

It took me over 20 hours to read this book. I was bogged down in one fallacy after another. Guessing from the marks I wrote in margins, this book has at least a mean of at least a half dozen fallacies per page. Far worse, unlike many books loaded with fallacies, there are almost no good points to give these arguments strength. A good rule here is to take what she contends and assume the opposite is more probable. I could easily write a 1,000 page book refuting this mess.

Burkett attempts a consumer choice argument: You had a child. You are completely responsible for it. Parents are completely responsible for children until 18, then after 18

the childfree, the state and the rich are magically entitled to wealth produced by children.

The problem is that Burkett has it backwards. The childfree decided not to have children. Maybe they deserve no retirement benefits or any other benefits from the labor of parents and children. As Wolf George and others say, without the labor and wealth produced by children and the unborn, all the paper and electronic wealth held by older Americans in public and private investments and retirement programs would be worth less than what is in a recycle bin. Retirement programs are welfare for the childfree, dead beat parents and one-child parents. They are “gentle peoples’“ agreements to deliver benefits to themselves, provided by those who lack seniority, voting power or who are not yet born. The ultimate source of retirement labor and income is other peoples’ children. Some adult children must wonder why they are legally coerced into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars of their incomes to dead-beats parents and childfree retirees who chose to invest in IRAs, cruises, and BMWs while their own parents invested in them and struggle to make ends meet.

Balancing “equality with need” is not a philosophy of justice. It is a philosophy of manipulation. Equality and need easily trick people into wrong beliefs. There are literally an infinite number of types of equality one can choose from. The question to ask when claims of need and equality are thrown around is “Who benefits and why?” Do the words serve some legitimate merit or overall benefit, or are they merely vague, single word bludgeons?

Not surprisingly, Burkett chooses the equalities that benefit the childfree. Strong arguments generally have an abundance of words and phrases such as harm, benefit, right, wrong, duty, rights, opportunity losses, declining marginal utility, negative marginal utility. Need and equality serve as emotively loaded buzzwords. The minions of equality are the minions of moral equivalence.

Here is why “equality” is morally worthless. Equality is arbitrary. There are many equalities to choose from. On

tax policy alone one can choose:

· equal percentage tax rate

· equal dollar tax rate

· equal tax on things I do not buy

· equal dollar reduction

· equal percentage reduction

· equal after tax income

· equal percentage reduction on the type of tax that I pay, no reduction on other taxes

· equal percentage up to a specific dollar amount, no tax above that amount

· equal dollar tax increase

· equal percentage tax increase

· equal future return on tax “investment”

· equal tax subsidies for those within specific situations

· equal taxes within a generation, unequal taxes among generations

· equality within a bracket

· equal tax on work income, no tax on nonwork income.

· equal consumption taxes

· equal tax on one group, no tax on another group

· equal tax on individuals

· equal tax on households

They all can not be correct and all of them are often wrong. Almost every form of equality violates some other form of equality. By the end of this book, I wanted to puke at the sight of the word equality. Most visions of equality usually mean equality of harm for everyone except the chosen elites. They often pass “across the (adult) board” policies that meet some arbitrary rule of equality, and punish children. Much of what is called equality is merely a ruse for harmful and unmerited privileges.

Thousands of children and young people die every year and lose their immense futures while organs are transplanted into self-abusing older individuals who have had the opportunity to live most of their lives all in the name of “equality,” or rather, equality of waiting in line. It surely is not equality of opportunity, equality of lifespan or equality of treatment based on past behavior. Rules must be right as well as “impartial.”

In addition, equality:

· Leads to arbitrariness, fanatical closure, and shallow judgments.

· Ignores horrible consequences and other well-reasoned, more important rules.

· Turns people into petty double standard mavens who burn about trivial violations of equality while ignoring major wrongs. It is the morality of the four-year-old.

· Treats people as merely a means to an end. It enforces destructive conformities.

· Ignores legitimate distinctions among individuals and situations. Ignores that some individuals would benefit much more from a good than others.

· Has a moral, historical record that is nothing short of horrific.

Moral beings should care about benefit, harm and merit—not dependency and destruction causing need and equality that causes overall harm and is unmerited.

Burkett is correct about a few things: The work place is not the territory for family policy. Keeping good parents from getting ripped off is the job of the government. Expectant mother parking is wrong. Mothers-with-infants to the front is bad.

But I have never seen expectant mother parking and I have never seen expectant mothers go to the front of the line. I have never even seen anyone offer the front of the line to an expectant mother. Burkett thinks American public spaces have become the Goo-goo Archipelago despite the fact that fertility levels that have declined well below replacement levels.

Parents should not shirk their work duties to take care of children, but Burkett writes as if it were an overwhelming injustice. She offers no numbers to indicate how widespread the practice is. Given the track record of this work with statistics, it is for the better. I would be willing to bet that parental shirking to take care of children accounts for far less than 0.1 percent of GDP. Taking a sick day to care for a child is not shirking.

While she rails against trivial wrongs committed by parents, she says nothing about the egregious practice of seniority pay, which is widespread, violates equal pay for equal work and has nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with legal power. For every dollar spent on corporate family policies, there are dozens if not hundreds more spent on seniority pay. Parents with young children are more likely to have low seniority.

What rationale is there for seniority pay? To compensate individuals for the great sufferings of middle age? To compensate dead timber for the sufferings of being burned out? If parents miss an hour of work, that’s a grave injustice, but if someone gets paid twice as much solely for seniority, that’s life? Boon is pico-economics writ large. If a trillion dollars get misspent, let’s not notice. If a parent misses an hour of work, watch out.

Take her claim “that women with children under the age of twelve were absent almost 25 percent more than women without children at home.” That might look persuasive, but what does it logically add up to? One or two days

a year—about 0.01 percent of the economy? One or two billion dollars? Is that counting maternity and paternity leave? Are the absences unpaid?

Are they using personal days and other time that the childfree could use also, but the childfree do not want to use because they want extra hours or overtime pay? Are fathers less likely to miss work than other men because they have a family to support?

Given the record the author quickly establishes with truth and justice, the explanations she offers as to why companies pursue family policies leaves me more than a little suspicious. I doubt that family friendly corporate day care will ever be common because most businesses these days are not stupid when it comes to their own self-interests. I cannot find any statistics, but I doubt if paid corporate child care and paid child leave add up to more than a fraction of one percent of the economy. One way it could become common is if parents are better employees than the childfree, an alternative explanation Burkett certainly does not pursue.

Contrast that with the over 1.3 trillion dollars in benefits delivered to retirees this year courtesy of parents. The flood goes in one direction and wet birds carry water in the other direction. Burkett is obsessed with the wet birds. The “slippery slope” has been running in the other direction.

Like most pundits, Burkett is in favor of Head Start, and like most pundits she offers no arguments for or against its effectiveness. Head Start has merely become a litmus test for writers to prove how compassionate and wonderful they are. Call it the Head Start rule.

While the well-being of low-income children is a major issue, this argument does not help them, they are merely a means to serve Burkett’s other goals. What does Burkett propose as a remedy for the needy? Nothing beyond the goal of ending need via welfare and Head Start. Big surprise. Apparently, equal pay for much less work is wonderful.

Let’s think through the consequences of Boon’s vision: To put a big dent in need the Burkett way, one would have to assemble a welfare package, including Medicaid, that spends at least $34,000 per welfare household per year. Since Burkett thinks differences based on number of individuals per household and moral behavior constitute “discrimination,” $34,000 would be available to each household and homeless adult. The result: Due to the aggravation effect, within the first two years, you would have at the very least 20 million adults sign up for welfare. There would be at least four million additional divorces and uncreated marriages, not to mention hundreds of thousands of additional foster children, since one could greatly increase one’s welfare by having nothing legal to do with one’s children.

Including indirect costs, costs would exceed $950 billion dollars per year in taxes and lost revenue. Total taxes on the remainder of the working classes would jump to at least 55 percent and the rich would do everything n their power to pay little more than the working classes. At this point, tens of millions more working adults would say to hell with being a sucker. The number of marriages would decrease by millions more. Taxes would continue to skyrocket. The vicious spiral would keep going until the economy collapsed from debts and shirking.

At one point Burkett starts whining about the number of children on prime time television, in anecdote form naturally. Do children, who represent about a quarter of the population, represent more than a quarter of major prime time characters? Yeah, right. What’s so good about being represented on TV anyway? Sounds like equal opportunity destruction to me.

She also tries to tie the mistreatment of women in past generations to the issue of treatment of today’s childfree. That’s a good one.

She excoriates parents who have an economic interest in the well-being of children as cruel Orwellians. She does not excoriate the childfree for using children and parents to serve the ends of the childfree. She does not hesitate to describe children as consumption items. The child as toy argument fails for two reasons:

· Despite what Burkett may have decided, children are human.

· One has right to some of the wealth generated by one’s efforts. If I buy a van and use it to generate money, I have a right to some of that money. As it stands now, parents pay almost all the costs of children and have almost no rights to the wealth produced by children.

Though it is irrelevant to issues of who is being cheated, it is worth mentioning that having children is not akin to having a pet or filling some unmet want. Children are wondrous beings in themselves. Here are some additional reasons why having children is fantastic:

· Benefit to the new human that is created

· Richer, fuller, more well-rounded human life

· Enjoyment of giving love

· Creating a more humane atmosphere.

· Joy of teaching new people wonderful ideas.

· Support economy now and in future.

· Support retirees.

· Give people goals that add up to more than packing the attic so full junk that the roof breaks.

· Benefit to family and friends who enjoy children.

· Pass on the great human ideals so that they may be spread to less fortunate places of the world. If Westerners stop having children, you can kiss the best parts of Western culture, which are unsurpassed anywhere in the world, good-bye.

· Keeps some adults from seeing themselves as the center of the universe.

· Keeps some Faustian characters from pursuing worse goals.

· Help escape the mind numbing boredom of pop culture, talking heads and vacuous academics.

· Give adults a more rounded view of what it means to be human.

· Develop depth to consciousness that cannot be simulated with pets and electronics.

· The more good lives, the better.

One poll suggests that seventy-nine percent of Americans get great satisfaction from their children, a higher percentage than from anything else in their lives.

What is important about kids and the unborn? What we do now affects their futures. Some may consider the future too distant to be worth the bother, but benefit, harm, duties and rights—morality—do not give a crap about the time and the unimaginativeness of the present obsessed. The foreign policies we engage in now affect what sorts of wars, weapons and terrorism they will face. The environmental policies we practice affect the health and esthetical values of the world they will inherit.

The minor virtue of the first chapter is that it generally stays close to the cheated childless issue. The remainder is a rambling jeremiad of irrelevancies. I have no idea whether Burkett was trying to argue dozens of issues at once or trying to use whatever rhetoric she could to help her cause. What does child abduction hysteria have to do with cheating the

childfree? Child abductions get coverage because they mean ratings for news organizations. Does the author want a National Organization of Abducted Childfree Adults to create a media frenzy of equal size? Childfree adults get much more attention when it comes to other media subjects. Childfree adult John F. Kennedy, Junior gets more unmerited attention than any child I know (sorry, for the small sample). Abduction hysterias may even hurt children because they give people the comfortable illusion that they are saving the children.

Even higher education is claimed to cheat the childfree. Apparently, the spectacularly obvious fact that almost all college students are adults, most of them childfree, has somehow eluded Burkett, who insists that they are children and that she has contributed greatly to their welfare by serving as a college instructor. I wonder if someday someone will start an age discrimination suit on behalf of a four-year-old because the government subsidizes the educations of adults up to tens of thousands a year, but offers nothing for the four-year-old.

Judging from the greedy, manipulative, interest group tone of this book and the self-serving contents of our nation’s colleges, it would not surprise me in the least. She may well have served their welfare. It is odd that the government will fund the optional private college educations of competent adults while young children in poverty are required by law to attend monopoly schools. At times I began to wonder whether Boon is satire designed to teach what a horrible, manipulative argument looks like.

Higher education is not a benefit for parents or minor children. It is a benefit for adults, especially university employees. It would be wonderful if instead of printing how much money colleges spend per student, colleges printed how much money they spend per faculty, administrator and cubic meter of construction, which is where the money really goes.

Burkett thinks public schools constitute some great benefit lavished to parents by society. It is hard to see how parents or the nation gain overall benefit from public schools. Public schools benefit special interest groups. Public schools are no longer the fertilizer of democracy. The influence of Horace Mann has waned. Judging by home schoolers, many parents peg the value of a public education at less than zero. Burkett will have a hard time proving that public education benefits parents unless there is a large contingent of parents out there who benefit from apathetic and nihilistic children.

She does not mention that almost every citizen at one time received free primary and secondary educations. Much of the educational expenses of the childfree were paid by other peoples’ parents.

When policies cheat individuals, several maneuvers are common. Among them:

· Claim that policies have no influence. Things are almost entirely the result of micro self-creation. This rule is conveniently disposable when the claimant wants policies in his favor. The anti-structuralists who rule the world magically turn into structuralists when a policy favors them.

· Whatever the cheating status quo, claim the status quo is in line with merit and that changing the status quo is too risky.

· Whatever the truth, constantly claim the opposite is the truth. Burkett’s strategy is sort of a neomarxist boring from within strategy. Thus, free choices made by employers equal a “Marxist wage system,” yet welfare equals justice found.

· Claim that opponents are moralizers while the claimant is tolerant and enlightened.

Burkett says we should “stop playing the ‘who makes a more valuable contribution to society’ game.” But that is asking us to turn off our moral powers, the most wonderful and best possession human beings have. The consequences of such an action would only be chaos and totalitarianism. Burkett does not notice that much of her argument implies or explicitly claims that the childfree make a more valuable contribution to society. As someone I cannot remember once quipped, “Demagogues love to ignite tensions in the name of easing them.”

Burkett writes that if you have the temerity to ask a person whether they plan on marrying their friend or whether they plan on having children, it equals “relentless social pressure.” If you upbraid someone for having more than two children, apparently, that is called having a conscience. I have heard more people excoriated for having too many children than people criticized for not having children. Something is wrong when giving an individual a life is disparaged as following the dictates of genes while empty, bloated over consumption is glorified as freedom, creativity and edification.

Building a strong version of the childfree-as-big-victim argument is a difficult task, akin to constructing a strong version of communism. Some may think I am creating a straw person here, but the strongest case that can be made is that the childfree have suffered minor, anecdotal harms, which is not surprising in a nation with 280 million humans. Everybody has suffered lots of minor, anecdotal harms.

The hoopla over Baby Boon has a surreal quality. It is as if a foul-mouthed person appeared demanding reparations be paid to the descendents of plantation owners for the damage done by the Civil War, then were invited to tea by the punditocracy. If Burkett talks like she writes, a hosting gig could be in her future. Burkett is mistaken when she alleges that “issues are not resolved by reason[.]” But reason has little to do with media success. Media success depends on being a battering ram equipped with a handful of buzzwords and absolute rules.

There you have it: A complete demolition of The Baby Boon using the facts. If Elinor Burkett has any shred of moral character, she will apologize for the vile thing she produced and seek to repair the damage she has done. Book review articles by J.T. Fournier.

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