May 23, 2013

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Can idealism save the Grand Old Party?

April 10, 2013 by 2 Comments

I is for idealism, which may very much be the future of the GOP, if it is to regain relevancy.

 

For 37 years, Ron Paul was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Largely ineffective there, he earned the nickname Dr. No for his unwillingness to vote for government spending. It wasn’t until he ran for president, though, that he really hit his stride and reawakened interest in a national libertarian movement.

Now, Congress and Presidential campaigns behind him, Paul is almost more popular now than when he was in office. With his son, Senator Rand Paul, taking the baton, speaking out against war and the growth of government and regularly mentioned as a possible contender for the GOP nomination in 2016, libertarianism (little ‘l’) is coming out from the shadows and, to paraphrase Politico, going mainstream.

Could it save the Republican Party?

With post-mortem of the 2012 election continuing six months after the polls close, it’s clear that Republicans are taking a close look at what it takes to win an election, and whether the White House will be attainable in the foreseeable future.

Led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), libertarians hope to become a dominant wing of the GOP by tapping into a potent mix of war weariness, economic anxiety and frustration with federal overreach in the fifth year of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The country’s continuing fixation on fiscal issues, especially spending and debt, allows them to emphasize areas of agreement with conservative allies who are looking for ways to connect with Republicans who aren’t passionate about abortion or same-sex marriage. A Democratic administration ensures consensus on the right that states should get as much power as possible.

Senator Rand Paul filibusters from the Senate floor in March of 2013.

Senator Rand Paul filibusters from the Senate floor in March of 2013.

Libertarianism is no new member of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan famously stated that “libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.” In the years since his 1980 election, though, the influence of evangelicals have pushed their own brand of big government into the forefront of the Republican Party, and libertarians have been largely left in the wings.

However, America has changed over the last generation. Whether it’s the war on drugs/poverty/terrorism/marriage–Americans are tired of the government telling them what they should, or shouldn’t do, and they are leery of the secrecy and expanse of a government that has colluded with Wall Street for big “bailouts” while compiling kill lists for drone hunter/killers.

When Senator Paul took to the Senate floor to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan as Director of the CIA, activists and individuals on both sides of the political spectrum applauded. As Harper’s Magazine observed

The antiwar left saw the filibuster as a challenge to the violence and the innocent dead left in the drone program’s wake. The antigovernment right rallied around Paul’s pointed question about whether a hypothetical Hellfire missile might just leave a crater where your neighborhood Starbucks once stood. Rush Limbaugh called him the future. Code Pink activists brought him boxes of chocolates. #StandWithRand was, for a moment, the most popular Twitter topic on the planet.

But can the popularity last? Can the anti-statist movement shift the Republican Party?  Can idealism trump the establishment?

It’s an open question, but one that could hold the future of the Republican Party. For years Republicans have talked a good game, promising less government, then blithely creating programs that expand government’s reach and cost. For example, Medicare Part D, one of the largest expansions of government prior to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) received strong Republican support, including from conservatives like Congressman Denny Hastert and Senator Orrin Hatch.

But not anymore: with continued high unemployment and growth failing to return to pre-recession levels, Americans are starting to question whether a government that promises the world and delivers higher taxes and fewer jobs is a government “for the people.” Obamacare begins to take full effect in 2014, and already businesses are cutting workers hours to part-time levels to avoid providing mandated healthcare. It’s cheaper to pay a financial penalty.

And so, the rise of an idealistic view of government, where the government that serves best is that which weighs on us the least.

Can it work? Will it save the Republican Party?

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month-long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter I, as in Idealism.

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Review | Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

April 4, 2013 by 9 Comments

200px-Debt_GraeberBy all accounts, anything written by David Graeber is about as far from typical “conservative” fare that you might expect to find featured on this site. Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist, an early member of the Occupy Wall Stree movement. He’s so “out there” that even Yale decided not to renew his contract as an assistant professor in 2005.

If he’s too liberal for Yale, then…well, you know. Probably too liberal for me, too, right?

Or maybe not.  If just to understand why the leaders of the Occupy Movement believe what they do, it might be worth the effort to read what he has written.

I heard about Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years from, of all places, a science fiction blog review (and my apologies for not remembering which one). The review described how sordid and strange certain cultures were in how they dealt with debt. It intrigued me: cultures on our own planet as foreign and strange as something that might appear in Star Trek or some other fictionally created world.

The descriptions don’t disappoint. But the strange trading rituals and bizarre debt arrangements between tribes, families, and individuals of the Australian outback, the African savanna, or the American forests that Graeber describes in his look at the last 5,000 years are just prelude. As the language of debt conflates sin, morality and finance, we come to Graeber’s central question:

What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?

English: David Graeber on a boat at Fire Island.

English: David Graeber on a boat at Fire Island. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a fascinating question, and it’s hard to not sympathize with the quandary that Graeber sees in the language that we have developed to talk about debt, our capital systems, and markets. Even so, Graeber’s conclusions make straw men out of the theories underlying the modern market economy, starting with Adam Smith, dismissing them with only short thrift.

This isn’t to say that Graeber doesn’t see a place for markets. It is capitalism, as means for power and form of slavery, that Graeber despises. “It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.”  For example, the conquest of the Americas is integrally connected to mass slavery, in the forms of African slavery and debt peonage. Chinese contract laborers built the North American railroad system, while “coolies” from India built South African silver mines. Peasants of Russia and Poland were free landholders through the middle ages, only becoming serfs at the dawn of capitalism.

And so on. The choice between state and market is wrong, he says, and it’s domination of political ideology over the last centuries has “made it difficult to argue about anything else.”

Capitalism requires constant consumption and destruction, Graeber argues, and for that reason has always been created by warfare and conquest, rather than as a replacement for barter as we have generally accepted (see Adam Smith).  With less and less to consume, humanity is reaching its social and ecological limits.

Graeber’s conclusions are, to say the least, a rewriting of history as we’ve been taught, to say nothing of how we view markets and capital.

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”

English: occupy wall street

English: occupy wall street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a rosy look at people who need not work to produce because they are free from debt, and in that sense, completely free. It sounds great…but it’s rosy, and ignores human nature’s desires to create and work.

Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years  is a monster of a book, difficult even, though always fascinating. While I do not agree with the extremities to which his conclusions take him, there is something to be said for the corruption created when capital and political power are conflated. Crony capitalism is a distortion of the free market, just as political interference in the market is a distortion.

At the very least, Debt measures up as an interesting anthropological history of cultures as disparate from my western world as Vulcans or Klingons are from us. More importantly, and more to the point why I recommend you read Debt, unlike cultures created for science fiction, they are real, and that in itself is worth the read.

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter D.

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Book Review: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010″ by Charles Murray

July 11, 2012 by 1 Comment

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have friends who remind me, regularly, that wealth is becoming more and more concentrated among the wealthy. Further, the “not rich” are making less than they used to, relative to the wealthy. In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

There is a divide growing in America, argues Charles Murray in his book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010″ but it isn’t necessarily over money. In fact, the divide may be greater because it is cultural, not just economic.

Displaying a dizzying array of statistics, studies, and research, Murray shows an America that is watching the rise of what seems, to me, to be a new ruling class, a group of elites that are well educated (“overeducated elitist snobs”), well-connected, and with a set of values and interests different from much of modern America. The self-segregation is not malicious, but, largely a result of people being attracted to others like them. As a result, their children grow up with a different set of values, more educated, and in turn marry people like them, further segregating themselves.

It works both ways, though, and Murray sets up as a comparison a hypothetical city on the upper (“Belmont”) and on the lower (“Fishtown“) ends of the spectrum to compare them. In his analysis, people in Belmont are better educated, less likely to get divorced (if at all), more involved in their community, work longer hours, are more honest, and are more religious. On the other hand, vital statistics in these areas for Fishmont show a gradual falling off over the last fifty years.

Why is this problematic? One reason is that it has resulted in a culture for the upper class that is completely out of touch with most of America. They watch different movies, take part in different social activities, drink different beers, and read different books. Their interests are not the same, and yet they are a select group that sets policy and opinion, controls wealth and power, for America.

Another problem is that the degradation of values in lower class America over the last fifty years is leading to a collapse of “American civic life,” something exceptional about America. At this juncture in the book, Murray, a confessed libertarian, recaps the roots and history of American civic culture and its uniqueness in the world. Neighborliness, vibrant civic engagement in solving local problems, voluntary associations, and so on. All hallmarks of America up to as recently as the 1960s, the members of lower and upper classes shared through these civic association a culture together that connected them and their values.

Further, although the elite retain some values, they have failed to lead. The elite class is as “dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way. Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdictated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards.” Instead, its most successful members take advantage of the perks of position without regards to the “unseemliness” of that behavior, showing something of a new “gilded age.”

Prognosis? “If the case I have just made for a hollow elite is completely correct, all is lost,” says Murray on page 294. The lower class is only barely able to care for itself by 2020, while the upper classes enter yet another generation separate from main stream America and further out of touch with the “real world.” Insightfully, then, Murray says that “new laws and regulations steadily accrete, and America’s governing regime is soon indistinguishable from that of an advanced European welfare state. The American project is dead.”

Is all lost? Murray says that for things to turn around, America must see four predictions borne out: America must watch what happens in Europe (and if the turmoil of the last few months is any indication, this prediction is bearing out), science must undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, it will become increasingly obvious that there is a simple, affordable way to replace the entire apparatus of the welfare state, and Americans’ allegiance to the American project must be far greater that Murray’s argument has acknowledged.

Could these be born out? Time will tell. In the meantime, it’s a powerful argument for a retrospection of the great problems of our times and our country.

View all my reviews

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One libertarian’s rationale for UTOPIA

June 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

[Jesse H. is a professional computer nerd and political activist, particularly in telecommunications. While I may be one of the "limited-government types in Utah" that Jesse is referring to below, I felt like it was appropriate to give him the space to defend UTOPIA, a project he supports. Jesse's intelligent, articulate, and witty, and I hope we can look forward to other thoughts from him here on Publius Online. You can learn more about Jesse's work at freeutopia.org]

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A pretty common target for limited-government types in Utah is UTOPIA, an interlocal agency formed by 16 member cities for the purpose of building a next-generation fiber optic network to every address in its footprint. The common refrain is that government should stay out of the private sector, a general sentiment that I would agree with. There are many cases where government may usurp a function better handled by private companies, and many more instances were government decides to support a politically connected entity to the detriment of others. Upon a closer inspection, there are all arguments that actually supports UTOPIA’s existence.

To understand the basis of this rationale, you have to go back almost a century. Way back in 1913, AT&T agreed to abide by the Kingsbury Commitment, a deal with the federal government that allowed them to operate as a legal monopoly. This legal monopoly persisted until the famous breakup of Ma Bell in 1984. Even then, the AT&T behemoth was broken into 7 regional monopolies and the only competition that was allowed for was in the long-distance space. Obviously, this approach had numerous failings. The regional monopolies still enjoyed significant market dominance from over seven decades of government support and still had a number of political connections they could use to keep new entrants to the market at bay.

To correct this, the federal government enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It required that the incumbent operators allow outside companies to lease their lines at competitive rates and provide competing service. In exchange, telecommunications companies received significant tax benefits (to the tune of $300B and growing) and promised that they would be rolling out advanced fiber optic networks to everyone in the country. As time wore on, though, nobody remembered the promises of the Baby Bells, and they often undermined the competitors on their networks with repair delays, customer poaching, and rate-fixing. In 2005, the requirement to offer competitive rates was dropped by the FCC. Several years later, Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest (now CenturyLink) unilaterally declared that the line-sharing requirements did not apply to any new fiber-based facilities, effectively killing off most of the few companies that had survived the other shenanigans. The phone companies had gotten away with the perfect crime: they had used almost a century of government-backed monopoly power to entrench themselves and now were free of most regulations that prevented them from abusing this power.

Cable companies haven’t been too much better. When most cable systems got started, they often required exclusive franchise agreements just to build. Cities eager to have the service would agree to these terms even knowing that they’d be a captive market for it. By the time competition was allowed, many cities had build-out requirements that required more capitalization than new market entrants were able to secure. Just like the phone company, being first to the market had allowed them to be shielded from competition, then set the rules by which they could compete.

The short version is that the government created and furthered the position of market dominance that cable and phone companies currently enjoy. A lot of libertarians will say that the solution is to walk back regulations that prevent new companies from providing service. That’s only half of the picture. Even if you eliminated every regulation on telecommunications infrastructure, the 800-pound gorillas still have a variety of tactics at their disposal to ensure they are the only game in town. This includes nuisance lawsuits over pole attachments and offering below-cost rates in competitive areas. Both are designed to slowly bleed competitors dry, and both are the result of being propped up by government power. Elimination of regulation only enhances the power built up via crony capitalist means.

There’s a limited number of options that are available. One option would be to go after the telecoms, but that would require a decade or more of lawsuits and wouldn’t be a guarantee. Another option is to break up the retail and wholesale operations to eliminate vertical monopolies and allow facilities-based competition, but that runs into the exact same problems as the first solution. While citizens could try to form their own cooperative to try and break themselves free, financial institutions are unwilling to provide the financing needed to get started because of the significant hurdles involved. It’s a bad situation which appears to be almost intractable. Where can we look for inspiration on how to solve the problem?

“Why won’t anyone listen to me?!” Ron Paul

Naturally, I think we can look to the godfather of libertarian thought, Rep. Ron Paul. In particular, his measured approach to Social Security provides some insight as to how we extract ourselves from the situation.  When asked if he would abolish social security, Rep. Paul said the following:

Yes, but not overnight. As a matter of fact, my program’s the only one that is going to be able to take care of the elderly. I’d like to get the young people out of it, just the younger generation, because there’s no money there, and they’re going to have to pay 50 years and they’re not going to get anything.

It’s a rather stark acknowledgement that in order to resolve a situation that’s far-gone, it’s going to require some long-term financial pain, pain that we’ve been trying to put off for a very long time. Paul also acknowledges the reality that government simply cannot walk away from the problems it has created. After a century of being propped up, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the pain of moving from crony capitalism to a free market would be significant. So how does UTOPIA facilitate the transition to a competitive free market?

The immediate benefit is the open-access model. While UTOPIA builds, operates, and maintains the physical network, it doesn’t actually provide any services directly to users. Private companies choose to participate on the network and sell services directly. At current, four companies are providing residential services and almost a dozen more are offering business services. Each of these companies offers a variety of service plans and prices, and then all compete very heavily on customer service, an area where the telecommunications industry has typically performed poorly. While the Telco Act of ’96 hyped the benefits of competition, a true open-access network realizes it.

It helps to understand how they are currently structured. Right now, UTOPIA employs a model where new subscribers pay to build the network to their home or business. This includes the cost of deploying from the curb into the building as well as a piece of the shared infrastructure. It’s amazingly cooperative-like except that the loans are backed by municipalities. Eventually, UTOPIA could easily move from city-controlled to subscriber-controlled. The municipal governments backing it are merely acting as seeders to get the market correction started.

While there is a lot of anger being directed towards UTOPIA over missed goals and costs, the anger should be directed squarely at the companies that necessitated its existence through government-backed market manipulation. Realizing that a truly competitive platform could end their gravy train, they’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at it to try and end it, a common tactic of an industry that gets a glimpse of its own demise. If you want to see a free market in telecommunications, support efforts like UTOPIA and push them towards a cooperative model.

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A Long Time Ago…Star Wars at Thirty-Five.

May 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Do you remember the first time you watched Star Wars?

Thirty-five years ago today, Star Wars debuted in theaters, quickly smashing previous box office records  and beginning one of the most iconic franchises in movie history, introducing the world to light sabers, Darth Vader, the Jedi, and the Force.

Equal parts science-fiction and fantasy, Star Wars has found a place in our imagination in the tale of Luke Skywalker‘s journey to destroy the oppressive Galactic Empire and become a Jedi. Along the way we met his mentors Obi-wan and Yoda, created friendships with the swashbuckling smuggler Han Solo and his side-kick Chewbacca, and found his lost sister, the Princess Leia (or was he the lost brother?).  And who can forget R2-D2 and C-3PO, the hapless participant droids without which Star Wars could not have been complete? The magic and the myth are as much a modern telling of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of Thousand Faces” as any in our time, and so, perhaps, as simple as the story often appears, we should not be surprised that it has weathered the decades so well.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that George Lucas has been an ardent force in expanding the franchise himself.

In honor the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), and in spite of the prequels (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith), I present a look back at the history of Star Wars and a few times that it made its way into our politics.

First, the history as presented in a chronology put together by Newsarama:

Star Wars hasn’t only been a financial success. It’s also found its way into our culture and the characters and themes are some of the most referenced in popular culture.  Even today, three and a half decades later, a Volkswagen commercial featuring a tot-size Darth Vader is as recognizable to children as it is to adults who grew up with Han, Leia, Luke, and Chewbacca in the 1980s.

Politicians get into the act, too. When, in 1983, Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the  ”evil empire,” it wasn’t a far cry from the “Galactic Empire” that a small band of rebels fought to bring down in Episodes IV, V, and VI. Later, critics of the Reagan Administration assailed the Strategic Defense Initiative plan to use satallites to shoot balistic missiles out of the sky, calling it “Star Wars.” Naturally, like any businessman whose livelihood is dependent on trademark, George Lucas sued, and lost, to stop the use of his “Star Wars” as part of the debate. In the ruling, the court admitted that the phrase had entered the lexicon of public use, and was not proprietary.

When politicians, newspapers, and the public generally use the phrase star wars for their convenience, in parody or descriptively to further a communication of their views on SDI, plaintiff has no rights as owner of the mark to prevent this use of STAR WARS. … Since Jonathan Swift’s time, creators of fictional worlds have seen their vocabulary for fantasy appropriated to describe reality. Trademark laws regulate unfair competition, not the parallel development of new dictionary meanings in the everyday give and take of human discourse.

It’s been a long time, but Star Wars effect on our culture has continued to grow and, though the nostalgia of the original series makes it difficult for older fans to accept, has gained new fans in younger generations with the Prequels and an expansion on the history of Anakin, Obi-wan, and the fall of the Jedi.

So, do you remember where you saw it first?

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Your logical fallacy is…

April 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

Someone ought to make finding logical fallacies in a politician’s speech into bingo. Just turn on the State of the Union speech and start filling your bingo card.

If it was a game, yourlogicalfallacyis.com would be the score keeper and the posters they are giving away for free would be the bingo card.

From the text on their poster, the site explains what a fallacy is, where  you can expect to find them,  and how to turn them back on their user.

A logical fallacy is often what has happened when someone is wrong about something. It’s a flaw in reasoning. They’re like tricks or illusions of thought, and they’re often very sneakily used by politicians, the media, and others to fool people. Don’t be fooled!

And the site is great, featuring links to each type of logical fallacy so that, when you’re deep in the midst of that never-ending online debate, you can finally prove why your opponents argument just doesn’t carry water.

Also, if you’re feel really gung-ho, they have full size vector files linked to the site that allow you to print out a full color poster of the fallacies, summarized and stylized for your reference. It would look great up on the wall next to that autographed picture of Antonin Scalia, don’t you think?

Learn the fallacies, and learn them well. You’ll be arguing like Plato in no time flat!

 

 

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What do women want?

April 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

I don’t know.  And I don’t  claim that I have a strong grasp of everything that women want or think (including on those occasions when my better-half asks me, to my horror, “what do you think?”).  I’m not a woman, and it would more than presumptuous to know what they want.

On that basis, I’ve found the made up “war on women” more than a little disingenuous. Whether it is Democrats attacking Republicans or Republicans attacking Democrats, both political parties are headed by men, have been for over a hundred years, and recently have even been bitten by awkward revelations and comments that seem to contradict what they say.

Democrats have criticized the Mitt Romney for not supporting the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Play act that extends the time that someone—ostensibly, women—may sue for equal pay treatment. And this is just one more piece of the criticism of Romney that he is conducting a “war on women” on issues ranging from maternal leave, contraception, and healthcare.

Ironically, it comes as Barack Obama’s White House was accused last week of paying female staffers 18% less than the men (and don’t start on the women in the White House working in lower level, and therefore lower paying, positions—it only begs the question why discriminatory hiring has put more men than women at the top).   Meanwhile, Hilary Rosen, a CNN pundit and Democratic strategist questioned whether Ann Romney, stay-at-home mom of five boys, had ever even worked a day in her life.

Listening to the tit-for-tat, one can’t help but suggest that perhaps both sides should “cast out the beam” from their own eyes…

Like I said, I don’t know what women do want, but I do know this: whether at home or in the workforce, women have more than proved their value to our society, many times over.

There are some things common to both men and women. We both want to be respected, honored for our choices, and appreciated for our work, whether in the home or out. We both want our children to have enough and grow up to be independent and productive members of society, we want to enjoy free time with our families, and we want  a little extra money to save:  for retirement, a vacation, a new car, or a down payment on a house with a bit more elbow room…or whatever.

And whether they are in the workforce or at home, women know this stuff just as well as men, if not better.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ask Muhammid Yunus.  In the mid-1970s, he pioneered a concept of using microloans to help impoverished villages in Bangladesh create economic development.  The loans had an incredibly high level of payback and low default rates, even compared to developed countries.  The institution Yunus founded—the Grameen Bank–actually worked to expand economic growth in the villages where they worked, especially among women.

One of the most interesting things Yunus found as the program grew was how effective the loans were at helping women take control of their future.   In fact, women were better borrowers than men. They would use the money to benefit their household to produce a steady stream of income, putting their children in school, and ending generations of poverty and ignorance.

And they paid off their loans on time, too.  Recognizing the power and the influence women had to transform their communities, the Grameen Bank, as of 2009, extended loans to 8 million borrowers, a whopping 97% of which are women.  In 2011, it was lending $100 million a month.

Lesson?  Women are reliable, they make smart decisions, and they understand economics.  Further, they know what they want and they don’t need men—whether in the White House or in the home, to tell them what it is they need.

All this is just prologue. When we come down to it, this is about how we—men, the government, and CNN pundits–get out-of-the-way and let women make the choices themselves. Whether it’s a husband, father, or government, women don’t need men to tell them what is right or what is wrong, how to spend their money or whether they should be working or not.  They know what is best for their families and they are perfectly adept at figuring it out without Uncle Sam telling them how.  They just need to be treated like their decisions—whether to stay-at-home and raise their children or to share the responsibility of providing with dad…or even, to not have children at all—matter and are respected.

That’s the reason why Hilary Rosen’s comments elicited so much ire last week, from all sides of the political spectrum.  From the stay-at-homes, it was a feeling that the elites of the world, the pundits and powers in Washington, don’t respect the work that a mom does at home. From the moms who work outside the home, it was a feeling that Ann Romney can’t understand how hard it is for those who must work to get by, or don’t have a man to share the load with them. For those of us who are neither (i.e. men), it was a collective feeling of recognition for what our mothers, wives and sisters have done to get us and themselves to where we are. To all of us,  it was offense that such an enormous sacrifice could be so blithely passed over.

Speaking as a man, women are our equals, if not our betters. Speaking as a member of the workforce, stay-at-home mothers are our equals, too.  Among other things, there is one thing we can do now to show our appreciation: let’s pay them fairly and equally when they are in the workforce, and encourage and support them in their choices when they opt to work in the home. It’s tough to be a mother—and no one should try to tell them that one political party or the other knows what’s best for them. They know best for themselves.

What do women want? They want to be treated equally and fairly in whatever choice they make.  They are smart, they understand the effects of their choices, and they move the economy.  Whether they choose to be in the workforce or at home, it’s time we treat them like they are the equals that they are.

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