There was once a Living Wage, so that a family’s father could support the whole family with one job, and the family’s mother could stay home to do the most important “job”, nurturing the children.
This was until the West’s leaders (Reagan, Thatcher, West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand), met at the G-7 Economic Summit in Ottawa in 1981 to decide that the powerhouse of American manufacturing had to be dismantled and shipped off to China.
This was the historical dividing line between the human flourishing of free enterprise vs. the trans-national, Capitalist-Socialism of “Free Trade”.
In the family, it was decided that women must be taken to work outside the home.
No one tries to pretend that childcare workers do 1% of the “job” that mothers do for their own children when they’re allowed to stay at home.
But capitalist-socialism had already been at work on the family for a hundred years, conditioning kids into mindless consumers and docile employees of gigantic businesses, since 1880.
John Taylor Gatto explains how the richest Robber Barons of the late 1800s, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Astors , Vanderbilts and others, were threatened in their domination of Capital markets by American farmers, “amateur” mechanics/engineers and small entrepreneurs.
The Robber Barons imposed compulsory, universal schooling, enforced by police, as early as the 1880s, after the Civil War, when impoverished returning veterans were deprived of their farms by bankers and taxmen, and forced into the factories of the emerging American industrial revolution. (There were riots in New York as late as 1915, over parents’ discontent about the 1907 Gary Indiana Curriculum.)
This meant that kids, who had been expected to aspire to become self-employed after the few weeks it took to learn arithmetic and reading, had to be conditioned in what we now know as socialism.