Childcare and Poor Mothers

An excellent comment was posted in response to an article in the DT moaning about childcare provision for "Poor Mothers".

R Mason had this to say:

There is no sense in paying women - and even teenage girls - to have babies on condition that the father does not live with them, paying them more for every baby they have, forcing them to go to work, to leave their babies with strangers, the strangers to also be women forced to work and leave their babies and for all their children to be less well cared for than if the mothers and father had stayed at home and cared for her child in the first place!!! This system makes the mothers bereft and miserable because they want to care for their babies themselves. Moreover, any complex conditional system is, like all means tested benefits, inefficient, ineffective, prone to fraud, unfair at the edges and very expensive to manage. 
We need to abolish the whole paraphernalia of child care and do just two things: pay a good child allowance for the youngest child only, non-means tested, taxable, full rate for five years and half rate for a further ten years before ending, at a flat rate for all. This would provide enough money for mothers to stay home and care for the babies and go to work later, pay for child care or leave their child with a friend or grandmother as they see fit. Also it would dissuade women from having more children than the can care or provide for and abolish the need for means testing because it would be clawed back in tax from the better off. It would also not penalize fathers for sharing family life, protecting and providing for his family as men and women want them to. 
One of the most destructive current beliefs is that all are entitled to have as many babies as they please paid for by others. For a minority, this principle means that babies become no more than a money maker which then become a majority in many places because of the numbers they have which is threatening the fabric of society. 
The second measure is the easiest. Pay all educational institutions by voucher and leave them to be independent working under a code of practice in an open market. This would abolish the massive, expensive but ineffective bureaucracy we now have.

Top drawer. The man should join The Libertarian Party!