However subtle and "humorous" the façade, we may recently have been slanked with the pinnacle of "Women are a Preferred Class, Dontcha Know" articles. Did you see it?

"Analysis shows" that stay at home moms should be making $131,471 a year...

..."if they received a paycheck".

Used to know a guy who said, "'If' is such a small word, with such a big meaning." Here the word 'if' has been used to imply meaning where there is none. But let me see if I can profit from this widely accepted illogic.

The people regularly visiting my blog are few, and nobody is paying me directly for my writing. Let's assume I spend 20 hours a week blogging. I hereby announce that I would be getting at least $30,000 a year "if i received a paycheck". And throw in a "if pigs had wings" too. But wait! Has anybody stopped to consider that in order to blog I must wash underwear, clip my nails now and then, and go to the store for groceries? I have not yet mentioned buying coffee beans, grinding them, pouring the distilled water into the coffee machine, and so forth. Blogging is a real chore.

Make it $45,000!

Let me calm myself a moment. Those are side points I mentioned, and perhaps overly snide and analogy-ish. Here's the question that helps fully expose the fallacy of the "if they received a paycheck" line: Who are the services performed for? In the case of my blog, all of the effort is for me. I like it. I choose to have a blog. One can't logically take those facts and then suppose fantastically that all this writing I do then carries the same weight it would were I writing for somebody else. I don't want to write for anybody else, and most mothers don't want to regularly perform for others the tasks they do for their kids and, if he exists, husband/partner. So what happens to the market "value" of those services? It plummets. Who you'll work for can be as crucial to value as the type of work performed.

This reality is no more evil or undesirable than gravity. Government and other abnormal influences aside, after negotiation, what people are getting paid in exchange for services is what they are supposed to be paid. It's a wondrous thing when viewed with perspective. Who is going to generate these "paychecks" the article speaks of? Nobody. Therefore, any dollar figures proposed fail to carry even theoretical weight.

Now I realize, given the entire article, that it's largely a piece of fluff for "Mothers' Day", but it's fluff with an attempted message — a message of victims (female, go figure) who've been given the shaft. The message dissolves when stripped of its rhetorical diverts:

If people got paid a bunch of money for doing something they do already for little money, they'd be making a whole bunch of money.

That's news? That's an "analysis"?

"But mothers do real labor — labor for which they'd get paid in different circumstances!" cries the flaggelator. Well it's no different from my blog, is it? The market will not bear such an exchange under current circumstances, and current circumstances matter if the situation can't be changed. The theme they're attempting rather oafishly to inflict is that mothers are "underpaid" — a distant cousin of the continual myth of there being a "glass ceiling" below which women remain in downtrodden captivity. There are big problems with the minds of those who write or believe such ill-considered statements. Often, such calls lead to "legislation", the generally acceptable word for "threatening to beat the shit out of you if you disagree". Beyond the violence of the thing is the untenable financial doctrine supporting it. As the US continue to the point where no decision for an individual may be made except by committee, exponential faith is placed in the childish supposition that money comes from nowhere — literally that there is no exchange, but only lofty opinions by which to dole out "funding" (that ephemeral fiction of perpetually self-generating, ever-flowing wealth).

Sad that it must even be mentioned, but despite attempts by the uneducated to paint society otherwise, everything must be paid for by somebody. The precept creep of merely deciding what people should be paid and then announcing it loudly enough to build up a head of steam leads to chaotic failure and resentment. Support for such a tactic exists only through moving the disasters far enough away from their cause, allowing the dream to flourish in the usual cycle that government begins anew by announcing it's needed even more sorely because of the fuckups it just caused. Nobody in government will put it so plainly, but you have eyes, don't you?

What people should be paid is what anyone agrees voluntarily to pay them. The reason no disinterested person or collective will ever pay the average woman anywhere close to $100K/yr to raise her own kids is that very few disinterested parties, when confronted directly on the matter (specifically at the wallet), care to pay people for situations which are already generally highly desired at no pay. In short, they don't give a genuine fuck. One may as well pick any hobby and bemoan its supposed lack of pay, trying to glom more respect for it by publicizing numbers that don't and can't exist in reality.

There is no general demand for people who want to have kids; it's what people do naturally. That's economics, and no high-minded simpleton can do anything more sensible than leave it alone. Any pretense that a job without a common market magically gets pay from nowhere is a brazen attempt to manipulate through lies. It's just as accurate to state that a mother would get $1 million annually "if she received a paycheck." My mother was worth that and more to me. But who was going to pay her?

The article ends correctly:

"I'm giving 150 percent of myself to them many hours a day,” said Debra Miley, who stays home with two-year old daughter Olivia and four-month old son Gregory. "You cannot attach a dollar value to the time that you spend nurturing your child if you're lucky enough to be a stay-at-home mom."

How many people read that far though? News as indoctrination will exist as long as the audience is passive, accepting the presumption that you can publish anything if you pretend to do it with balance. The only balance for some propositions is the trash can.