Jeffrey Epstein's Cuties 5

We started this series with a historical explanation how notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's taste in fulfilling his desires toward young girls is, by historical standards, entirely normal.  It is only in the very most recent historical times that there has been any thought that nubile teenage girls needed, deserved, or had any right to protection from older male predators.

Indeed, by historical standards, Mr. Epstein was an upstanding example of morality, in that, as far as we are aware, he offered financial compensation to the girls for their services, paid them what he promised, and returned them otherwise unharmed.  We are told that some of the girls sought to increase the scope of the services they offered in return for increased compensation; per their testimony, if they rendered those additional services, they always received whatever had previously been agreed upon in payment for services voluntarily provided.

Although what has been termed the "oldest profession" has always involved apparently-negotiated compensation, most women throughout history have instead been trapped in something not far from slavery where they had absolutely no practical right or ability to self-determination, or to make substantive choices of any kind.

In the previous article in this series, we discussed some of the lies about the past history of slavery that have been used by various interest groups to get political power in the present.  We showed that in the pre-technological world, women were unavoidably subordinated to men by Mother Nature, because they were simply not strong enough to hunt or farm sufficiently to provide for a family.  A woman thus depended on a man who would do either of these things and share food with her.

The only rationalistic reason to put an end to slavery of weaker people in general and women in particular was because increased productivity made slavery uneconomic - it was cheaper to own a tractor or dishwasher than to own enough slaves or wives to do the same amount of work the machinery could do.

Westerners who have grown up with fossil-powered machines have difficulty grasping how difficult life was in the muscle-powered era.  This article has a video about the Charles Bridge, a Gothic structure in Prague.  Its construction was commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, began in 1357, and took 45 years.

You'll see a manual pile driver around 15 seconds in.  As you watch the animation of piles being driven into the riverbed, reflect on how much work driving each one involved.  People manually cranked the weight up in the air, then let it fall on the pile, over and over again, pile after pile after pile.  They used a water wheel to pump the water out of the cofferdams where they planned to build the foundations, but you'll see other human-powered machines lifting stones as the project goes along.  Just thinking about all the labor involved makes us tired, and should make us very grateful for all the Dead While Males who invented steam engines, electricity, and other power sources which ease our burdens.

Muscle and Morality

Morality is a different story.  Morals, in the sense of knowing what is right and what is wrong, have been around for thousands of years, but it only recently occurred to anyone that the status of women and slaves might be morally wrong, because only recently did economics permit that argument to be plausible.

Even without women being able to earn money themselves, women's rights benefited from increased societal wealth, because wealthy families wanted to make sure that a daughter's portion of the family fortune would not be controlled by her husband as had been the custom since time immemorial.  This required giving women (gasp) the right to own property!

The right to own property wouldn't have benefited non-wealthy women unless there was some means by which a woman could acquire property herself.  This became possible in America when Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, NH started hiring women to manage their spinning machines around 1850.  This was the first time an ordinary American woman could acquire her own property without a man's help.

From this foundational right, all other rights followed, including the right to vote granted on June 4, 1919, long after women had gained both the right and the opportunity to earn a living independent of men.

There's a fundamental point here that is being intentionally obscured by modern feminists and the left: Whatever rights women have were voluntarily granted them by a very specific group of Dead White Men of conscience, who were under no legal or physical obligation to do so, and in fact whose ancestors had scrupulously avoided doing so for all of human history.  After all, no less a leader than Sir Winston Churchill had argued that giving women the vote would cost England their Empure.  Women got the vote; England lost the empire.

Freedom of women from household slavery and from slavery to pregnancy and nursing was made possible by the inventions and entrepreneurial efforts of another very specific and readily-identifiable group of Dead White Males - we know them as inventors, scientists, and the architects of the Industrial Revolution who invented home appliances.  We can argue over why they were nearly all white, Western, Christian, and male, but it is an historical fact that they were.

As we've seen, without their efforts there would be no women's rights, and no low-level person's rights either, because society simply couldn't afford them, as it could not for all of human history until pretty much the day before yesterday.

Did women "win" their right to vote, as is constantly claimed?  Well, they certainly agitated for it in various ways, or, using an irredeemably sexist turn of phrase, they nagged men to give it to them.  Despite the fictional Ms. Banks' famous song, women did not "fight" for their rights "militantly"; they protested loudly and obnoxiously, but what little violence they employed was minor and ineffective.

Some of the protesting women suffered abuses at the hands of male officialdom, but by comparison with, say, the casualty count during the struggle against slavery, this was an infinitesimally small inconvenience.

In stark contrast, American blacks in large numbers laid their lives on the line fighting for freedom with the Union Army.  Many died, then and in the decades of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era to follow.  Women neither did nor were called upon to do the same - their words were 99% sufficient.  All the change-making action was taken by men who voted for bills to enact women's rights, invented technology to make them affordable, enforced protection for women through law enforcement, arrested male predators, and so on.

How, then, have women used the rights they came to enjoy?

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Although efforts to limit the consumption of alcohol were common during the 1800s, the movement didn't really get going until the WCTU got started in 1873 and spawned an international division in 1883.  From its beginning, the WCTU constitution called for "the entire prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage."

As the movement grew in strength, members branched out into agitating for the right to vote and promoted other reforms.  In the 1880s, the WCTU promoted "age of consent" laws to protect Cuties-aged young people, for example, though it took several decades to get much traction.  Underage prostitution wasn't widely banned until around the First World War.

Getting the right to vote in 1919 helped the women's movement bring about Prohibition in 1920.  It wasn't so much that women were able to exercise their newfound voting rights that quickly; it was more the fact that the ruling patriarchy accepting the women's plea for voting rights made them more inclined to accept their anti-alcohol crusade.

As we all know now, Prohibition didn't work out well because too many men (and women) were determined to consume alcohol in spite of the law.  At the time, though, the temperance movement specifically hated alcohol because of its harmful effects upon women, namely, the wives and children of drunks who beat and neglected them.  These abuses were very real, evil, and continue to this day, but instead of hating men who abused alcohol, they decided to hate the substance.

Whereas today we attempt to protect victims of abuse by prosecuting and convicting abusers, the WCTU felt that a better solution was to blame "demon rum" instead of blaming those who abused it, and thus take liquor away from everyone whether guilty or not.  There were only a very few religious uses of alcohol permitted, regardless of the fact that the overwhelming majority of drinkers never abused anyone.  Do we see echoes of this in modern leftist "if I don't like it, you can't have it" over-regulation of just about everything?

For all that the WCTU had good motives in blaming and outlawing "demon rum," selling bootleg alcohol gave organized crime its start and led to the elevation of J. Edgar Hoover, the founding member of the Deep State, to national prominence as head of the FBI.  Prohibition is now almost universally considered to have been a disastrous policy failure with ghastly long-term consequences.

It is a historical fact that Prohibition was primarily driven by women, the women's movement, and women's rights, in an utterly failed attempt to protect women from abuse by drunken men.  So, naturally, we've repeated the error by trying to prohibit all manner of other things women have decided that they don't like.

The Great Society

Several decades after Prohibition was belatedly consigned to the dustbin of history, President Lyndon Johnson pushed for legislation to create the "Great Society" welfare programs.  By this time in the 1960s, women had amassed considerable voting power and a government program to fund abandoned women and children was an obvious vote-getter.

Although LBJ publicly promised that people would not stay on welfare for very long, his remarks about tying up the black vote for 100 years indicate that he realized that dependency on government would lead to more people voting for more entitlements.  That's exactly what happened: we now have multi-generational families of failure, where single mothers born from single mothers give birth to the next generation of single mothers in rapid succession, aptly summed up by the phrase "babies having babies."

In effect, LBJ led the government to subsidize immorality and failed child-raising, leading to our debauched inner-city and deep-rural culture failures at vast ongoing expense.  Today, the overwhelming majority of black Americans in particular have no father in their lives, with well-documented negative consequences for their possibilities of future success.

What may come as a surprise, however, is that blacks as a group don't have the highest rates of single motherhood.  American Thinker reports:

"The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 Black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan's teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy's is 6.9, and France's is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately."

In 1965, the percentage of Blacks born out of wedlock was 25%, a number considered so alarming that it prompted then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D) to write his controversial report: "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Today, the percentage of white children born out of wedlock is 28%.

We can't help but notice that centuries of chattel slavery did not destroy the black family.  Nor did the violence of the Reconstruction era, nor yet did the profound injustice and oppression of Jim Crow.  At the time the Great Society welfare programs were instituted, only 14% of American children were in single-parent homes, and that was usually because a parent had died.  Of course, Mexican-Americans weren't exactly welcomed with open arms, but they were never legally enslaved.

It was only when Democrats started writing welfare checks to single mothers of all races that the strength and unity of black family structure in particular, as well as that of Mexicans, was destroyed.  As Thomas Sowell put it, "The black family survived centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.  It could not survive liberal welfare programs."

As with Prohibition, the Great Society was a well-meaning attempt to address a very real and serious problem: nobody wants to see abandoned mothers and babies starving, any more than we want to see brutal drunken husbands beating their wives and children.  A half-century of experience, though, clearly demonstrates that, in the long term, the cure has been vastly worse than the disease, destroying lives generation after generation and turning prosperous cities into barren wastelands.

Both these failed policy prescriptions were driven strongly by women, for the protection of women, in response to women's perfectly legitimate feelings of care and concern for others.  Somehow, though, not only were the long-term downsides unseen or ignored, we no longer seem able even to discuss or address the now plainly visible downsides in a rational way.  When Sen. Moynihan warned of the dangers of destroying families and suggested that welfare money be given to married women only, he was trashed for "blaming the victim."

"An atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses" and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil ... evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature."

He also said, "In order for men to commit great evil, they must first be convinced that they are doing good."

Rank-and-file liberals are so convinced that all welfare programs are good that they cannot see the evil they do.  Liberal leaders know full well that using affirmative action to put black kids in schools too tough for them, and excusing black and other minority kids from normal disciplinary standards because they get in trouble more often than white or Asian kids, sets them up for failure.  This keeps black people dependent on government handouts which increases the Democrat vote at the cost of destroyed lives.

As also with Prohibition, the welfare policy was a broad-brush penalization of countless millions of innocent men.  Responsible drinkers who'd never raised a hand against anyone had their evening tipple criminally penalized, just as today's dutiful husbands who provide for their wives and children are dunned for massive taxes to cover the cost of sending welfare checks to children sired by feckless ne'er-do-wells who impregnate compliant women without consequence.  The Daily Mail tells us of 3 American men who had 81 children by 46 different welfare women and provide no fatherly influence or child support at all - so it all goes on your tab, now and forever, from generation to generation.

The Downside of Caregiving Programs

It appears that not having to care for yourself or for other people is unhealthy - unemployed young people get bored and are tempted to cause trouble by dealing drugs, rioting, creating single mothers, or whatever else comes to mind.  Medical researchers are beginning to suspect that a child's immune system needs challenges to develop fully and that kids need exposure to germs as they grow up.  We suspect that some degree of struggle is needed for people to attain their ability to function, and that total lack of struggle is harmful to our humanity.

FEE explained how John B. Calhoun proved this for mice.  He set up a "mouse utopia" in the 1960s at the National Institute of Health, where he provided unlimited food and water and watched to see what would happen.

At first, the mice did well. Their numbers doubled every 55 days. But after 600 days, with enough space to accommodate as many as another 1,600 rodents, the population peaked at 2,200 and began to decline precipitously-straight down to the extinction of the entire colony-in spite of their material needs being met with no effort required on the part of any mouse.

The turning point in this mouse utopia, Calhoun observed, occurred on Day 315 when the first signs appeared of a breakdown in social norms and structure. Aberrations included the following: females abandoning their young; males no longer defending their territory; and both sexes becoming more violent and aggressive. Deviant behavior, sexual and social, mounted with each passing day. The last thousand mice to be born tended to avoid stressful activity and focused their attention increasingly on themselves.  [emphasis added]

We've pointed out that many of the wealthier, more accomplished demographic groups are not having enough children to preserve their cultures.  Have all these caregiving programs made life too easy for our society to survive?  Or is the fear of being damaged by "caregiving" programs causing parents to hesitate?  That is what the New York Times argued in "Motherhood in the Age of Fear."

Child Protection Services (CPS)

Our modern child protection services system is another government program that could not have come into force without a great deal of support from voting women.

Interestingly, the concept of interfering in private actions in families to protect children came years after society started worrying about protecting animals.  A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) is a common name for non-profit animal welfare organizations around the world. The oldest SPCA organization is the R(oyal) SPCA, which was founded in England in 1824, long before women got the vote.

Elbridge Gerry founded the world's first first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) in New York City in December 1874, 50 years after attempts were made to protect animals and 45 years before women got the right to vote.  Within twenty-five years, over 150 organizations across the nation joined the effort to protect children from abuse.

These privately-funded nonprofits mostly sufficed until Senator Walter Mondale promoted the "Mondale Act" in 1974 to create federally-funded child protection agencies in each state.  Again, women voter's desires to protect children from abuse is a noble impulse, but as with most such projects, government actors turned out to be far less effective than the earlier privately-funded organizations.  Faith and Reason explains how this well-intentioned effort ended up with the government abusing more children than parents ever had.

Although Senator Mondale, even as he sponsored the CPS legislation, warned that the law was likely to be abused, he did not provide many protections for parents who had been falsely accused of child abuse.  Abuse hearings were to be confidential to protect the privacy of the child. This made it difficult for parents to complain when the agency abused them

The fundamental problem is inherent to all government programs - no agency will ever willingly solve whatever problem they're chartered to address.  Solving the problem would cut the budget, which is anathema to any bureaucrat.  Instead, any agency will lie, cheat, and steal to increase the scope of their mission so that they can demand yet more money next year.

Some of the dishonest techniques by which social workers manufacture evidence against fathers to support their annual claim "There's a lot of abuse out there" were documented in "Presumed Guilty," published, of all places, in Playboy Magazine, June 1992, p 74, back in the era when some of the articles there actually were worth reading - but, please pardon the absence of a link.

This particular article was meant to warn men that mothers seeking sole custody after a divorce often made up false abuse accusations to persuade a family court judge to see things their way.  Since a lawyer's job is to get the client whatever the client wants and the CPS legislation attached no penalty to making a false accusation of child abuse, any divorce lawyer who failed to advise his client to accuse her former husband of child abuse would have been negligent. Playboy wrote:

"Almost always, you find kids who are three or four years old. The two year olds are no good because they can't speak well enough and are totally unreliable in what they do say. The five- and six-year-olds are already old enough to say 'He didn't do that, lady, and nothing you say is going to convince me.' But threes and fours are perfect. After they've been worked over by a parent or zealous validator, they can be counted on because they believe it and will testify accordingly."

The bottom line is that whenever government tries to engage in improving human behavior, be it banning alcohol, banning drugs, banning sexual abuse, funding fatherless children, or trying to protect children from abuse, the government programs enacted to limit these harms end up doing more harm than good.  Overall, government makes a terrible parent or caregiver.

Public Education

A large majority of public school teachers are women, particularly in the younger grades.  Teacher's unions have embraced women's natural urges to worry about unfairness, inequality, and the planet.  Instead of concentrating on imparting knowledge to turn students into future taxpayers, public schools teach social justice, gender identity, Gaia, equality of outcome, and other topics that won't help students earn a living.

Public schools today emphasize socialization over knowledge - it's harder to evaluate so it's hard to show that the schools are failing, although when students shoot each other, it could be argued that public schools can't even teach kids to get along.

As usual with government-driven organizations, the participants ignore the upcoming consequence of not having enough taxpayers to fund their retirement pensions.  How are all those graduates who can't read well and can't make change for a dollar going to learn how to fix the roads and repair solar systems and windmills?

In our current era of pandemic - or, more accurately, Dem-panic - the teacher's unions find themselves in an awkward Catch-22.  They don't want to teach kids in school due to fears of a virus that, basically, doesn't kill children and all and rarely affects pre-retirement adults.  They want more money to compensate them for the increased risk, but parental backlash at their refusal to do their jobs is growing across the country.  At the same time, the suddenly-universal paradigm of online learning has allowed parents a window into the propaganda that's being shoved down their kids' throats, with unpredictable consequences for the future.

Public schools, as such, predated women's rights, so blame cannot be laid at their door.  It's striking, though, how badly the quality of education has declined since it was largely taken over by, not just women, but politically-active women.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)

It's hard to see through all the politically-inspired smoke and mirrors, but given all the accounts of collegiate "severe trauma," "rape culture," and "sexual assault" we keep hearing about, it seems that otherwise well-brought-up college ladies are at a bit more risk of trauma of that sort than in the relatively recent past of their mothers and grandmothers.

This is odd, because collegians' instincts haven't changed, any more than human nature has.  If you put college-age kids in a bag and shake it, you get couples just as in ancient times.

Alcohol hasn't changed either  As always, "Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker," and it appears that most traumatic college incidents are fueled by alcohol.  Take couples and add alcohol, you get coupling, even if the outcome might be traumatic for some.

If neither booze, boys, nor girls have changed, what has?  Our drinking laws.

Sixty years ago, the drinking age was 18.  College freshmen were legally permitted to drink, so colleges held officially-sponsored "mixers" which were alcoholic parties where faculty and non-drinking students, the designated adults for the evening, kept things from getting out of hand.

From the best motives in the world, MADD wanted to raise the drinking age to reduce alcohol-induced driving fatalities.  This had the undesired side effect of leaving underage collegians drinking without adult supervision because faculty would get in trouble if they were present at illegal drinking.  College kids being college kids, the drinking happened regardless of the laws on the books.  Without adult supervision, a couple of inexperienced drinkers kill themselves every year by drinking too much too fast and suffering fatal attacks of alcohol poisoning.

The sexual results are as predictable as they are unfortunate.  Once again, MADD fell into the trap of taking alcohol away from collegians who needed adult supervision as they learned about alcohol and each other, with the result that kids who had little if any experience with alcohol drank unsupervised.

These programs would be far less likely to be enacted without the benign impulses of women voters - and, because of those same women voters, it is impossible to get rid of them no matter how spectacularly and comprehensively they have failed.  Imagine the retort - "Oh, so you're in favor of my child being killed by a drunk driver?"

Just Another Interest Group

We've seen that once voting women learned how to exert political power, they used their power to fight against real evils that particularly affected them - just like any other voter or interest group.  In fact, that's the very definition of democratic representation, which was their original goal in agitating to be given the right to vote.  This is a perfectly understandable outcome.

What was neither expected nor understandable was that, overall, women appear to have promoted their programs on a purely emotional basis that is entirely devoid of any concern for the actual outcomes of the programs they promote.  We've seen that the specific policy solutions promoted by women writ large, when tried in the real world, actually made the problems worse - while, at the same time, creating brand new unanticipated problems.  For examples, we see today the explosion of fatherless children brought about by our welfare programs, and the increase in unfortunate outcomes of all sorts when you mix alcohol with unsupervised college kids because underage drinking is now illegal.

This is certainly not unique to women's issues - regular readers of Scragged will be familiar with the Law of Unintended Consequences.  What's peculiar and new is that women's groups and their voters appear to be almost incapable of realizing and accepting facts about how badly their policy prescriptions have failed, and changing course accordingly.

Instead, they persist in continuing to pursue the exact same failed premises - almost always, more government spending and more intensive government regulation - while expecting a new, unique, and different result of success.

As we've seen is also the case with liberalism in general, though, neither women's groups, their preferred political party, nor women in general appear to pay any political price for being repeatedly and disastrously wrong.  The unfortunate result, which we'll look at in the next and final article in this series, is that political women have moved from pushing what turned out to be bad solutions to real problems, to policies that are just plain destructive, toxic, and corrosive from the get-go.

Indeed, it's getting to the point that our long-term societal survival, never mind success, is at risk - but we'll look at that in the final article in this series as we bring it to a close.