Child care election battleground

Child care is the latest battlefield between the social democrat and the neoliberal view of the proper role of government.

Child Care Battle

 

Paul Lakeland comments that the many current crises in our world all have something in common. Each in its own way exploits and thrives on division—between the rich and the poor, humanity and the rest of the natural world, citizens and immigrants, the relatively safe and the deeply desperate. He believes these issues are all parts of one larger, fundamental crisis: the degradation of the very notion of the human, brought on by the complex mechanism today called neoliberalism.

If “neoliberalism” is a word unknown to you, or simply one that you hear without its impinging much upon your life or consciousness, this is testimony to its sinister force. Coined by Friedrich Hayek, it referred to his belief that all reality can be explained on the model of economic competition, and that all human activity can be measured in terms of wealth, value, or price. Price in particular was a means to allocate scarce resources, and for its efficient function, the market had to be free and competitive. “The market” for Hayek was not just a term for economic activity, but one that described society as a whole. Hence, he could extrapolate a vision of human beings as creatures who would and should follow their own self-interest in competition for scarce resources. Through this human competition, we would learn who and what is really valuable…1

Donald Gutstein, adjunct professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and author of Harperism: How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada, writes that Harper, as you may have guessed it, sits firmly in the neoliberal fold. These are the ideological roots of Harper's opposition to child care.

Neoliberal influential economist: Milton Friedman2

In education, a system of government-funded vouchers that would enable parents to choose the school—private, public, religious—their children would attend.

Government planning will always lead to worse results than if the market or voluntary organizations do it2

 

 Treasury-draining, dollars per year benefits will not create a single child care space, let alone a national program.  What it will do is make the introduction of any national child care that much more difficult to finance - and imagine - in the future.

 

References

1	(2020, June 1). Spiritual Resistance | Commonweal Magazine. Retrieved June 1, 2020, from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/spiritual-resistance
2	(n.d.). The ideological roots of Harper's opposition to child care. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from https://www.broadbentinstitute.ca/the_ideological_roots_of_harper_s_opposition_to_child_care