David Brooks, in his latest New York Times column:
If you believe in the dignity of labor, it makes sense to support an infrastructure program that allows more people to practice the habits of industry. If you believe in personal responsibility, you have to force Americans to receive only as much government as they are willing to pay for. If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.
If you believe in the dignity of labor, it may make sense to oppose an infrastructure program that would forcefully extract, through taxation, money earned through labor and give it to politicians and lobbyists to dispense for pet pork-barrel projects like bridges to nowhere built by overpaid union contractors and dressed up with the name "infrastructure."
And: "wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable?" What happened to the personal responsibility and fiscal restraint Mr. Brooks was touting in the previous sentence? Are we supposed to believe that women will find previously unmarriageable men newly desirable now that they come with a government-provided wage subsidy? If the "wage subsidy" comes from taxes imposed on the higher-earning women, how does that make them better off than they were to begin with? I'm looking forward to a whole column, rather than just a throwaway line, from Mr. Brooks on this particular proposal. He could use it to explain who is suggesting this, if it's been tried anywhere and whether it worked when tried, why it's just, why it's not sex discrimination, and why it wouldn't create perverse incentives or unintended consequences (why bother finishing school or acquiring skills if your low-wage job comes with a "wage subsidy"?). This American Prospect article has grist for such a column.
