PAFERE  Articles Articles Paweł Toboła-Pertkiewicz: Leave the Family alone!
|
|
Paweł Toboła-Pertkiewicz: Leave the Family alone! |
|
|
|
24.05.2008. |
 The world is founded on the family. In spite of this, the State is trying to replace the family, although no state institution is able to replace the closeness, love, and happiness, that parents give to their children.
Dr. Michael Miller of The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty says that more and more people demand governmental care, willing to place their freedom and, consequently, responsibility for their families in the hands of state institutions. It is a very dangerous tendency because it leads to a destruction of the institution of family.
The State instead of the Family
French traveler and writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the XIXth Century that "the State assumed the role of the family so no wonder that everyone who is in need calls the State for help". Formerly, when people were in trouble they asked their family, relatives, and neighbors, for help. Today they turn to the State and its specialized institutions. Examples that illustrate the depth of the interference of the State into family life are numerous.
One: the childbirth benefit
The State begins to help the very moment a new family member is born. It pays the parents a childbirth benefit for every child that is born. Irrespective of the amount that is paid it is money which has been taken away from the mother and the father in taxes. In result, the whole procedure is nothing more than a transfer of the parents' money back to the family via government offices. The transfer itself costs some money so what the family gets is less than the original sum.
Two: compulsory education
When the child achieves a certain age it is coercively taken away from its parents to be educated. The child learns the values chosen by the government and not the values of the parents. The State declares that it will raise our children so that the parents will have more time for themselves and the mothers will be able to develop their careers. The parents practically do not participate in this process. Sometimes it leads to a wide gap between the world of the parents and the world of the child.
Three: material aid
The State secures, at least formally, the material needs of the family, assuming, in consequence, the role of the family head, traditionally the man, who was responsible for the maintenance of the family. Thus, the father's authority is undermined and he no longer has a pattern to follow or be the provider of everything the child needs. This situation tends to demoralize the father because he loses incentive to act, as the State provides the means of living for his children. One of the sources of alcoholism and moral deterioration of husbands and fathers is the fact that they are not responsible for their families. It should be remembered that the state budget is comprised of the funds taken away in taxes. It means that every zloty paid by the State has to be taken away from taxpayers. This procedure is not costless - the bureaucracy has a cost.
Four: the State builds flats and houses
Governments build flats and houses for future generations, carrying out a broad housing policy where hardly any young married couples can afford to buy a flat. Within the framework of pro-family, and in fact anti-family policy, the State liquidates construction-renovation tax allowances that were useful when someone wanted to renovate a flat inherited from his grandparents. Then there is a Value Added Tax on construction materials or purchases of new flats, making the already terribly high prices rise even further. The State also collects money by means of the inheritance tax. There are plans to introduce the cadastral tax which will kill the hope of thousands of young people to have their own place.
Such a policy leads to a situation when young people who want to live together have to take loans from banks thus, becoming debtors for periods of tens of years long just to buy houses that the State promised to provide for them. A cheap credit does not exist and its payment successfully discourages people from having children. First we have to pay back the loan, then there will be time to have children - say young people. They will pay the loan back in 30 or 50 years, so they will start to think about children after they turn fifty.
Five: old age care
The State, developing and supporting the system of social security, assumed the role of protector of elderly people. The results are known by every pensioner who despite a whole life of hard work receives a pension which barely suffices for his basic needs. The State does not even have scruples about taxing the pensions, which is an instance of double, or even triple, taxation. How the care of the Sate about the oldest generation look like is also known by pensioners' children - they often have to buy medicines for their parents or pay for private medical services because their parents cannot afford medicines, and waiting in a queue to get public medical services may take too long for an elderly person.
Six: social security
In case the family gets into trouble, the State provides social security services. The point is that traditionally help in such situations was given by more distant family members, neighbors or the parish. Now people in need do not ask relatives and acquaintances for help, they turn to governmental offices.
The State, although it tries to replace the family and assume the functions of its members, is not a rich philanthropist who can afford such generosity. The State does not have any incomes above the money it takes away from its citizens, that is mostly from families. So it is generous at our expense, spending a substantial share of the collected money on "the operational costs". These costs are the wages of officials who implement aid programs for families, their offices, the equipment they use, and a lot of other things. Social spending, of which the great majority are pensions, constitutes almost 30 percent of the budget. An average family gives tens of thousands of zlotys each year to the State. Let us take a concrete example of a person earning a gross income of 2000 zlotys. His net earnings are 1446. 48 zlotys, and it will be instructive to trace the fate of the rest of the money he earns. 274.20 zlotys is the compulsory premium paid to the social insurance institution (ZUS) which is responsible for paying out pensions. 124.00 zlotys is an advance payment of personal income tax. Since the state bureaucracy is fond of making things complex and hiding the scale of taxation from the eyes of the public, the rest of the "premiums" is officially paid by the employer - in this case it is the rest of the ZUS premium, that is 321,20 zlotys, 49.00 zlotys of an unemployment insurance premium and 2,00 zlotys of a guaranteed employment benefits premium. But it is obvious that the employee is the one who earns the money for all those premiums, as no employer could afford to pay someone else's premiums for a long time. In fact, the employee's work brings not 2000 but 2372.20 of income, but what is left for him is only 1446,48 zlotys. An easy calculation tells us that an employee earning an average wage gives away 1225.72 zlotys to the State bureaucracy according to the above pattern. If you multiply this amount by 12, the number of months in a year, you will get almost 15 thousand zlotys, precisely 14708,64 zlotys. Would not the 15 thousand zlotys suffice for education and medical care payments of the taxpayer if this amount was left in his hands? And we did not take into account all forms of taxation. The Value Added Tax is a burden for all buyers of popular products, such as a daily newspaper, and the excise tax, imposed on fuel and other products which is paid by hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Are the services that the State provides to families worth that much?
People believe that the State can provide them with almost anything from the moment they are born till the end of their lives - from medical care in their childhood, education, a job, a pension, and care when they are old. This belief often results from lack of knowledge and naivety. If people knew basic economics they would know that the State does not produce any goods. State revenues come from citizens' pockets and everything they supposedly receive from the State is financed by themselves - says Dr. Miller.
It is enough not to interfere
Considering pro-family policies, implemented by every government, independent of the parties that compose it, it seems the best pro-family policy is the one which does not deprive the family of the income earned by its members. It is also the best one from the ethical point of view, as it does not give us the right to live at someone else's expense - the ruling principle of every system of aid for families. Constant aid from the State makes the family dependent on that aid. It also creates a detrimental image of such a form of help as being a norm, not an exception.
How can the significance of the family be restored? The Church takes care not only of the moral and religious dimension of the family, but it also provides aid to the needy. It is more efficient and cheaper than the State because, in accordance with the subsidiary principle which is supported by the Church, it provides aid on the local level, where the problems of individual families are known and people are not strangers to each other. It is a much more successful method of bringing help to those in trouble.
However, the Church also should not assume the role of family members. No one knows better the problems the family face than the family itself.
Costly Aid
American economist Charles Murray, in his book entitled "Loosing Ground" which was published in 1984 thirty years after the federal government implemented large scale pro family aid programs, showed, inciting an uproar among government officials, that the programs which were supposed to help poor families not only did not solve their problems but made them more severe. In 1950 the federal government spent 36 million dollars on social aid programs. In 1980 it was 300 million or almost ten times the previous amount. Yet the number of people taking advantage of governmental aid practically did not decrease. Still, the number of officials responsible for implementation of the programs increased four times.
One of the most important examples presented by the American scientist are the research results showing that disintegration of the families which received social aid from the State was 2.4 times more frequent than in the case of families which refused to accept the aid or were not covered by the programs.
The research conducted by Murray also shows how the social aid provided by the State influenced the number of extramarital children. In result of the financial protection for lonely mothers the number of children born outside marriage had been constantly rising. In 1980 unmarried women gave birth to 55.2 percent of black children, while in 1950 it was only 17 percent. The results for the white population were not better, as the percentage of children born outside marriage rose from merely 2 percent in 1950 to 11.1 percent in 1980.
On the basis if these and other research results Murray came to the conclusion that the policies of the State brought more harm than benefit to the family. Not only did they not solve any problem but they contributed to the growth of the number of extramarital children; not only did they lead to the more frequent disintegration of families, but the poor families were brought into permanent poverty.
The Author of the article is Vice President of the Polish American Foundation for Economic Research and Education. The article was published in "Gość Niedzielny", a Catholic weekly, no 9/2008.
|
|
|
Wsparcie
|
