National leader Christopher Luxon received a blasting from the Prime Minister yesterday for saying to parents, "you chose to have these kids, you have to wake up at 7am, get your kids to school at 8am", in the wake of poor school attendance data.
PM Ardern said she didn't agree with Luxon's comments and described them as a "simple view of the world". She said people do need to take responsibility "but just making an argument that that is the solution to every issue that we currently face won't fix the issues".
Well, I can't think of practically anyone who has a more nuanced and scientifically informed view of the world than Nobel Laureate Heckman who we quoted in the last blog as stating that whatever the welfare program, “the whole activity has to engage the family .. Nobody wants to talk about the family, and the family’s the whole story”.
The "whole story", eh? Once you go down the road of creating a vast welfare state which the PM which like to increase in size even more, the role of the family becomes greatly diminished. Welfare support then becomes a substitute for family support and is nearly always less efficient. Once the family has largely been disbanded, then the PM is correct - problems become very complex and expensive to fix, and mostly doomed to failure.
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