Robbing Peter to pay Paul?

It's a very strange world we live in.. Think about it, the 'economy' needs workers, 'mothers' seem to be an available demographic, so let's pay them (in childcare subsidies) to get them into the work force.. WTF?

How about their children need them? Or, that the rest of us could do without subsidising people earning up to 530K per annum to have their children looked after?

Has society has lost the plot? - obviously the need to have children and families is a basic societal construct. But which comes first? - society, or the economy?

Most of us would answer 'society comes first', but we all know that the fact is that the 'economy' comes first (according to corporates and governments, and that this is their priority is reinforced by their actions).

Starting 'at zero' we have:

• governments paying subsidies and rebates to families to support their children,
• father goes to work, pays taxes, much of which is are recycled back to him by offsets, subsidies, and rebates,
• encourage mother to go to work, so that she's in the 'economic sausage machine', she pays taxes too,
• and most of that tax is recycled back to her as rebates on childcare,
• the government employs umpteen people in social services and tax departments to administer all this money recycling,
• the corporate sector gets a whole new rentier activity, i.e. the child care sector, largely government funded, it can 'skim profit off'.

This is but one example of many like arrangements where government-labour-corporates 'feed each other', simply sending money around in circles. The thing about the above process, and many other examples like it, is that it doesn't produce anything. Of course more women in the workforce is productive, but the 'money recycling' as per above, is not.

Is it like the ultimate outsource? We have outsourced everything else in the home, from washing to cooking, so why not outsource raising children?

Like everything else I'm sure it's not black and white. But, talking about how you adapt society to serve business and the economy seems pretty arse about if you ask me..

And just as I finished writing this I came across this headline "Use ‘grey army’ to solve the labour shortage: Kean".

buggered if I know :-P