Last weekend, I was privileged to speak at the third annual Essentials of Freedom conference – and I do hope to have either the video or, in the least, the audio, of my speeches for you in the near future.
Yet this is not why I am raising this point.
This conference featured talks by both a feminist (Elsa Shieder) and an anti-feminist (Karen Straughan). I actually really enjoyed Karen’s talk, because it was factual, well researched and reality based. You can read the transcript of Karen’s speech here, but, here is just from the intro:
A lot of you who are familiar with this topic might think that feminism’s war against the nuclear family began in the 1960s with the second wave. Prominent writers, activists and thought leaders of that era certainly seemed to have quite the bone to pick with men, the nuclear family and the institution of marriage.Robin Morgan, Catherine McKinnon, Linda Gordon, Sheila Cronin, Andrea Dworkin, and others all viciously attacked marriage above and beyond any other foundational institution of society.From Dworkin: “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.”Gordon: “The nuclear family must be destroyed… Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.”Cronin: “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.”
Xanthippa:
When the United States was first constituted, it was left up to the states to determine who was eligible to vote. In most states, only property owners were eligible. In most states, that included women and free blacks, though a few states did limit the vote to white male property owners.
Now, however strongly cultural Marxism conditions us to react negatively to such ideas, let us not forget that white male property owners are precisely the people cultural Marxism exists to defeat.
So let us put prejudice aside and consider the matter on its merits.
If you want a well-run country, you want savvy voters. And if you want savvy voters, property owners are the people you seek.
Why? Because a fool and his money are soon separated.
If you’re savvy enough to raise the capital to buy some property, or savvy enough not to lose the property you inherited, then you’re savvy enough to vote.
In that regard, property owners of both sexes and all colours are effectively indistinguishable from each other.
But.
John Lott and Lawrence Kenny have shown very clearly that that the real decline of America commenced about the same time as the 15th Amendment extended voting eligibility to women.
Specifically, in every state, they found the government growth curve to be a hockey-stick curve. And, in every state, the kink in the hockey stick happened exactly when women started voting.
The published paper is here: Lott Jr, John R, & Kenny, Lawrence W, 1999: How dramatically did women’s suffrage change the size and scope of government? Journal of Political Economy, 107(6):1163-1198.
Take a good look at figure 2 on page 1171 of the linked paper. It shows the per-capita size of government over a span of twenty years, centered on the time women started voting. For the first ten years, the size of governmnet remained roughly constant. Then women started voting. In the next ten years, the size of government doubled.
Recall that women who owned property were already eligible to vote, so the women who started voting at that time were mostly those who did not own property.
Bottom line: those who own property vote to limit government, and people who do not own property vote to make government bigger.
On a similar note, Vlad had recently sent me another video that explores the sexual dimorphism of our species, with particular emphasis on how male and female successful reproductive strategies differ from each other and how this necessarily leads to differing political strategies espoused by men and women:
Interesting thoughts, no?
What do YOU think?
