“Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers.”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
One of the most depressing consequences of socializing the cost of child rearing in our towns, especially for people who like kids, is that young families are discouraged from moving in unless they can afford to buy a single family house and thus pay very high taxes.
If you attend any public hearing about residential development plans you’ll invariably hear people, even many who are parents of school-aged children themselves, warn that it might attract people with children and that the schools and other youth services are already being overused and that our taxes will go up. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get approval for any multi unit housing with units big enough to have more than one child in. Since when did young families become the “wrong” kind of people?
When people vote to make their children a financial burden to their neighbors it causes a lot of divisiveness. We are seeing this right now over Belmar’s proposal to allow non senior citizens to rent back houses. The cost of services for the potential increased number of children in town is one of the objections we are hearing to the plan.
If everyone just paid for their own kids’ stuff we wouldn’t see any opposition to more children coming to town. Remember that the government can not do all these things for the kids without first taking the money that’s needed for it from us. But if they didn’t take the money from us we could just do it ourselves if we thought it was worthwhile. And without filtering the money through the government, it could be done at much lower cost. This is especially true about the schools, which have completely insulated themselves from even the slightest hint of market forces.
It just makes no sense for our leaders to on one hand advocate for more child services from the government on one hand, yet on the other hand act to discourage people with children from moving to town. It makes no sense unless you consider that only parents who already live here can vote.
I don’t ask my neighbors to subsidize my grocery bills (and they should be very grateful for that!) so I don’t see why I should ask them to subsidize the cost of raising my children either.
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