Yes, it’s myopia. Your standard would rule out love between man and God; between children and parents; on the part of elderly people or handicapped people who are dependent on others. There are many stages of our lives where we depend on the care of other human beings, and at all stages (for the Christian) we depend on God.

Yet you’re saying that love is “fundamentally incompatible” with those relationships. Do you realize what a radical statement that is, especially for a professed Christian?

Family bonds, when “obligatory,” can be experienced as repressive, to be sure. Yet it is only in taking responsibility for and caring for others that we become decent human beings. Your receipe for society seems to be this: 1) None of us can give or experience love through much of our lives (because we need other people); 2) Only during a few decades in adulthood can we truly experience love; 3) Our experience of love occurs when we are radically atomised individuals who show love and help other people only when we feel like it (”choice”) and only insofar as it furthers our own self-improvement (”personal growth”); 4) Instead of being caring and devoted parents/spouses because it’s the right thing to do, we should shunt off our family responsibilities onto the state.

Actually james I think that there probably are a lot of women raising unwanted children; those kids start out as wanted and then when the woman discovers something called ‘parental responsibility’ and all of the attendant sacrifices that go with it, those kids then become ‘unwanted.’ ‘Unwanted’ status is highly dependent on what point in the child’s life you make the determination.

I had to read this several times over to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. The only major economic power in the EU is Finland? According to Wikipedia, the GDP of the EU in millions of international dollars is a little less than 14 million (that is, 14 trillion international dollars), making it the single largest economy in the world. Finland contributes a little less than 180 thousand (180 billion international dollars) of that. That’s about 1.3%. In absolute terms, Sweden and Denmark both contribute slightly more than Finland, and France and Germany both contribute more than ten times what Finland contributes. Finland’s contribution to GDP per capita is higher than France or Sweden, but it’s also less than Denmark. Do you honestly believe the moderate but strong projected economic growth in the EU (2-2.5%) is going to be driven entirely by Finland’s relatively minor contribution — and that Finland’s growth will be enough to more than counteract the economic collapse you predict for Norway and Sweden (and France and Germany and the Netherlands and so on)? There seem to be two possibilities here: either Finland is also an `economic disaster’ (and being an economic disaster is not particularly bad), or Finland is experiencing economic growth literally never before seen in the history of humanity.

And, of course, none of this shows that libertarian social policies foster high standards of living in the long term. Are you familiar with the work of Amartya Sen? He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis showing that, for example, the democratic socialist (and, incidentally, strongly feminist) social policies of Kerala, India, were some of the most important factors in that state’s dramatic standard of living increases (measured in terms of things like life expectancy and access to education) over the past several decades. I highly recommend his Development as freedom.