Title: Don't confuse compassion with indulgence: we should discourage the formation of single-parent households and help the poor to help themselves.

Full Text: The Liberals and the NDP are the parties of compassion--right? Wrong! They are the parties of indulgence. Compassion and indulgence are as far apart as good and evil. One, in fact, is a virtue, the other a vice.

Aristotle observed that, generally speaking, moral virtue is the mean between the extremes of excess and defect, both of which are vices. Courage, for example, is the mean between recklessness and cowardice; generosity is the mean between prodigality and parsimony.

Compassion is the mean between indulgence and indifference. We are compassionate when we identify people in adversity and try to help them. We are indulgent when we pander to their weaknesses and risk harming them.

Virtues and vices are habits. We acquire them through repeated practice. The Liberals and the NDP have been practicing indulgence for de

The political left seems peculiarly inept at predicting the probable results of its social policies and practices. It has institutionalized what close observers of practical politics call the law of unintended consequences.

Title: Mother's dilemma: the hard decisions of a stay-home mother: Barb

Summary Notes of Single Family Life Articles

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