Encouraged by our IT Department to remove "personal files" from a drive on our work computers, I found the following old LTE--letter to the editor--from April of 2002. It was a response to this article in the Minneapolis newspaper. My letter wasn't published, but dang it, I have a blog now, and I'm copying it in to help fill out the picture of my disgust with the administration of Bush the Younger. It's possible that I'd been reading Swift around this time, too.
To the editor:
An April 22 news story--"Welfare debate: what to do next?"--mentions the Bush administrations's effort to enact new laws encouraging welfare recipients to marry.
While the initiative is without question well intentioned, I suspect that the outcome of matrimony for the poor is about what it is for the rest of us--sometimes favorable, sometimes not, the devil residing in the details of the available options and the particular choices made. It's even likely that market forces conspire against the interests of the marriageable poor.
As people transact their affairs, seeking under the gentle auspices of an invisible hand to maximize their advantage in life, a kind of winnowing action brings together able and attractive people possessed of bright futures, thereby leaving those with fewer assets to scavenge among picked-over remains of which they are themselves a constituent part. Lord knows we all try our best, but in competetive markets nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.
So although conservatives have a lot of sound advice for the poor, extending "get a job, any job" to "get a spouse, any spouse" has the potential to append a crippling exponent to already meager fractions. What the poor need is not "any spouse" but the particular kind often possessed by compassionate conservatives who, if my incomplete knowledge of their habits can be trusted, tend to find their soul mates at slick colleges charging in excess of twenty thousand dollars per year [ed comment: dated material].
I therefore propose government action to encourage compassionate conservatives to marry the objects of their compassion. Perhaps the population could be divided into "marriage groups" based on such factors as educational attainment and household income of the family of origin. There could then be a direct transfer of public money to new households formed by the union of mates from unlike, noncontiguous marriage groups. The arrangement is admittedly deficient in romance but the divorce rate proves people need to be more practical anyway.
On a superficial level, my proposal may appear to conflict with the conservative mantra of "lower taxes," "limited government," and "personal responsibility." I can even foresee that one or two conservatives inclined toward bombast might lament "the intrusive reach of the nanny state into the realm of matrimony" as well as "the elevation of gold-digging to federal social policy." Yet their views on subjects ranging from the entertainment industry to presidential cavorting suggest that, when the stakes are high, American conservatives stand ready to put an activist government at the service of the public good.
Besides, the initiative is mainly President Bush's. I'm only trying to nudge the government's matchmaking activity in a direction that will boost the social utility of civilization's most important institution.
