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March 07, 2004
Sweden eden By Tom Smith This interesting article from googling "Sweden sex." And yes, I was looking for this sort of thing--I didn't google "Swedish blondes," which gets what you would expect. I gather that to get babies in Sweden, you have to import them. Why not make them at home? Perhaps because Sweden enforces child support laws against men, and so men don't want to help make them. Some delicate discussion of the apparent tendency of these imported kids to commit suicide at a disproportionately high rate. And Swedes already off themselves at an alarmingly high rate, and drink a lot too. Some of that must be the miserable climate. And maybe some Swen the Horrible, he of the large sword and self-destructive tendencies, got into the gene pool a few centuries ago and hasn't been diluted out yet, since it's not that diverse a country. Who knows. I wonder whether it's gay marriage and the like that underminies traditional family structures in the great North Whiteland, or just socialism? Maybe gay marriage would be just fine, if the government didn't subsidize it or problems it might create. I tend to think the reason traditional nuclear families have prospered is that they make more economic sense than the alternatives. But if you subsidize various not-very-independently-viable family forms, you will get more of them. So then the question becomes, not whether gay marriage should be allowed in some robust libertarian society, where the answer may well be yes, but what it effect it would have in this one where social pathologies have a way drawing down government support. So if we end up with even more single moms with kids, the product of temporary lesbian marriages, then there will be even more pressure for state provided child care, which will in turn reduce the incentives to form an economically viable family in the first place. In my nightmares, the state says, well, we're paying for them, so we should get to determine their design features. But nothing like that could ever happen, I suppose, since we don't intend it to. |