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KIDS

If parent's deserve to be paid, where
is the money going to come from?

If well-raised children are valuable
commodities, you should be able to
sell them at a profit to pay back your
investment.

So say, when you're kids get out of
college, and you place them with some
corporation, you should get a cut of
the money.  It could be a one time
payment from the company to the
parents, in which case they'd probably
want the kid to sign a long term
contract.

Or maybe the idea would be that
parents own their children until the
kids can pay back what their parents
have invested in them.  So you might
be responsible for paying a percentage
of your income to your parents for
most of your life.

What other possibilities are there?
You could just have tax money given
to people with kids (just increase
the size of the deductions in place
already).


Kids could be taken from parents at
birth and raised in state controlled
institutions, (after all, this is
obviously too crucial a matter to
trust to unqualified people).

Or maybe the way to go is to have all
child-rearing adults get together and
form a union, where they could
threaten to go on strike unless
explicitly paid for their efforts.

So the idea would be that the
"bread-winner" would have to pay for
the privilege of having their genes
replicated and/or their personality
impressed on the child.

But then, it's fashionable to argue
that human beings are a glut, you
know?  Population explosion.  Burden
on the environment.

In which case, I would think there
should be financial disincentives to
raising children.  Parent's should be
fined or taxed for doing it (rather
than the slight encouragement they get
under the present tax codes).

Though it might be argued that raising
kids is it's own punishment.  (It is a
little difficult for me to understand
why an intelligent person would do it.
It seems like a poor stab at
immortality.  The rewards -- fun? --
seem small compared to the amount of
work.)

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