The Family is in the Worst Shape Ever

The family is the basis of all civilization. Without it - and most especially successful ones - you're not going to have a successful society.

Marriage and families are in a bit of trouble right now.

The marriage rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low - 6.8 marriages per 1000 people. There are several reasons for this. One, the economy is close to being a catastrophe, and when it gets like that, people can't afford to get married, buy a house, and have kids.

Why is it a near catastrophe? The same as always - State inference in the free market. Income taxes. The Federal Reserve Bank. Bizarre regulations. Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations. (Before the introduction of the Federal Reserve Bank and the income tax America had its most spectacular growth ever - from 1869 to 1879, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for real GDP and 4.5% for real GDP per capita.)

Two, it doesn't benefit most men to get married, when his wife can use no-fault divorce to get divorced, and use the court system to take his kids and money. In fact, the United States has the highest divorce rate in the world - and most of those divorces are initiated by women.

Until the early 20th Century, in a divorce, the children were almost always given to the father. Today, most of the time, the children go to the woman. As a result, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father. With that comes approximately 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States being on food stamps. It's been projected that about 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point before they are 18.

Those hit hardest are the middle class. There is no hope for the lower classes - there never was, since the poor are always with us. They're always going to be parasites and trouble-makers.

The rich will do okay, as they always do. So who is left? The middle class.

At one time the U.S. had the largest middle class in the world. It used to be nearly everyone in that class had a house (and sometimes a vacation cottage), a car or two, yearly vacations - and saving for retirement at the same time.

Now we have four out of five U.S. adults struggling with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives. And in one survey, 76% of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

According to the Social Security Administration, 40% of all workers in the United States make less than $20,000 a year, the the ratio of wages and salaries to GDP is near an all-time record low, and one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

Is there any relationship between the destruction of the middle class and the destruction of marriage? I think it's pretty obvious there is. Squeeze the middle class, squeeze marriage. Destroy the middle class, destroy marriage.

These problems aren't just in the U.S. They're world-wide. The wealthiest one percent now own 39% of all the wealth in the world. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% only own one percent of all the wealth in the world combined.

We have inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. How? Through democracy, which creates conditions in which people can vote themselves other people's money. Which works just fine until the money runs out.

Which, unfortunately, it has.