Families should be builders and transmitters of wealth, not as their highest purpose but as a proximate and practical purpose of living in the world. Teach your children the way you make your living, so at least they know one way to make a living. Homes should be centers of production, not just palace residencies. Piecework, cottage industry, remote work, subsistence farming, multi-family living, mixed-use zoning, taxation in kind rather than in cash, ancestral family land, and of course the commons all make life more human and more sustainable.
I'm not full-on saying there must be a repudiation of the industrial revolution! Medical care relies on much of what came out of that. But we can't have an atomized, lonely society and make sense of happy family life, which both makes life liveable and presents to us very core images of what God (and the INHERITANCE he promises us) is like.
Live on less stuff, and with more people. Is that a moral principle? An eschatological principle? Or just good economic sense?
My husband's trade (teaching) is easier to model at home than my current one (policy wonkery). Like a lot of people, I have more of a bundle of skills than a trade or career and I've held a lot of fairly different jobs where the skills seemed suited.
Which seems to me a great case for homeschooling, obviously only if possible! There are a lot of factors that make it not possible. Those skills can pretty easily be built into a curriculum while also double dipping into state standards. My wife has a lot of skills, but as a baker doubling a recipe is a great way to learn math, especially fractions, and then you get cookies at the end.
"...the work you do for and with your family..." This work is nothing more or less than work I do for myself. What I derive from this work is inseparable from what my family derives - we are me and they is us...!
When two people commit to each other, they become a team and it matters little who does what. There are many things going wrong in today’s society and the family is one thing that needs to be done better.
Firstly the family you create has to supersede the families that you both came from. Secondly, you are a team with one set of values (but two viewpoints on those values, so communication is key). Thirdly, this is one pot of wealth for the family. So be more generous with your spouse than you would yourself (admittedly we both had bouts of extreme poverty before we met so it was easy)
Lastly, have kids or at least a child because being a parent is by far the most important thing you will ever do
Now as for the question of welfare and the cost of living. For decades I have been pro-welfare because it provides economic stability. Unfortunately I ignored the cost to people’s lives. Generational dependency breeds a lack of effort where you have whole families who have never worked and no one can read or write. That is unforgivable. And this problem is growing not shrinking. As for cost of living, we do not need more handouts. We need cheaper outgoings. Our government is too expensive to keep and this has been the death of every civilisation before us, and our energy prices are too high.
Cut these two things and you will see the cost of living plummet.
But to answer the crux of the article, both should contribute towards the household in deeds and money and it should not matter who does what because you are part of a team and your teammate matters as much as you do.
Check out Stan Rogers, "The Idiot." I think it's true that the government dole will kill your soul, but I don't think there are too many welfare queens. Enough time in that kind of environment, and people want to claw out, even though they don't necessarily know how. Then they rely on public assistance, in the form of infrastructure, especially schooling.
Families should be builders and transmitters of wealth, not as their highest purpose but as a proximate and practical purpose of living in the world. Teach your children the way you make your living, so at least they know one way to make a living. Homes should be centers of production, not just palace residencies. Piecework, cottage industry, remote work, subsistence farming, multi-family living, mixed-use zoning, taxation in kind rather than in cash, ancestral family land, and of course the commons all make life more human and more sustainable.
I'm not full-on saying there must be a repudiation of the industrial revolution! Medical care relies on much of what came out of that. But we can't have an atomized, lonely society and make sense of happy family life, which both makes life liveable and presents to us very core images of what God (and the INHERITANCE he promises us) is like.
Live on less stuff, and with more people. Is that a moral principle? An eschatological principle? Or just good economic sense?
My husband's trade (teaching) is easier to model at home than my current one (policy wonkery). Like a lot of people, I have more of a bundle of skills than a trade or career and I've held a lot of fairly different jobs where the skills seemed suited.
Which seems to me a great case for homeschooling, obviously only if possible! There are a lot of factors that make it not possible. Those skills can pretty easily be built into a curriculum while also double dipping into state standards. My wife has a lot of skills, but as a baker doubling a recipe is a great way to learn math, especially fractions, and then you get cookies at the end.
"...the work you do for and with your family..." This work is nothing more or less than work I do for myself. What I derive from this work is inseparable from what my family derives - we are me and they is us...!
When two people commit to each other, they become a team and it matters little who does what. There are many things going wrong in today’s society and the family is one thing that needs to be done better.
Firstly the family you create has to supersede the families that you both came from. Secondly, you are a team with one set of values (but two viewpoints on those values, so communication is key). Thirdly, this is one pot of wealth for the family. So be more generous with your spouse than you would yourself (admittedly we both had bouts of extreme poverty before we met so it was easy)
Lastly, have kids or at least a child because being a parent is by far the most important thing you will ever do
Now as for the question of welfare and the cost of living. For decades I have been pro-welfare because it provides economic stability. Unfortunately I ignored the cost to people’s lives. Generational dependency breeds a lack of effort where you have whole families who have never worked and no one can read or write. That is unforgivable. And this problem is growing not shrinking. As for cost of living, we do not need more handouts. We need cheaper outgoings. Our government is too expensive to keep and this has been the death of every civilisation before us, and our energy prices are too high.
Cut these two things and you will see the cost of living plummet.
But to answer the crux of the article, both should contribute towards the household in deeds and money and it should not matter who does what because you are part of a team and your teammate matters as much as you do.
Check out Stan Rogers, "The Idiot." I think it's true that the government dole will kill your soul, but I don't think there are too many welfare queens. Enough time in that kind of environment, and people want to claw out, even though they don't necessarily know how. Then they rely on public assistance, in the form of infrastructure, especially schooling.